Sunday, December 15, 2013

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Raising chickens continues to be an avocation laced with travail.  After the Grizzly Bears destroyed the chicken pen and ate all but 3 of the 14 chickens summer before last, my enthusiasm for hen fruit had diminished, but last winter I continued to feed and water our remaining two hens (the rooster was picked off by another predator) along with 4 hens given us by a friend.  Only two of those made it all the way through the winter.  We came home from a few days away to find a trail of feathers (or maybe 2 trails as the varmint came back for seconds) leading from the chicken coop up the stairs and around to the front of the house, disappearing in the more commonly traveled area.  By late spring, I found the last headless hen with the crop gone. 

At that point, I had pretty much decided that chicken ranching would not be my niche.  My daughter Carolyn, however, decided that it would be hers. She ordered some meat hens along with a “Surprise Special” consisting of an unknown number of chicks as well as geese, ducks and turkeys.  All told, she had upwards of 40 birds when a little girl she babysits killed some of them.  The mother was so apologetic that she ordered another “Surprise Special” which booster her numbers to around 70 birds.  The attrition rate was pretty dramatic with all of the young children, dogs, and predator birds around, and by the time they butchered the meat hens, they only had 35 or 40 left.  A friendly fox would come visiting a couple of times a week and carry away one bird on each trip, so their feed bill decreased a bit, but they were still left with 2 geese, a turkey, a duck and a flock of chickens. 

Carolyn asked if I would like some of her birds and, after careful consideration, began recouping the chicken pen.  (OK, only a small chicken joke)  I decided that to stand up to the bears, it needed to be a sturdy pen, so I put an 8 foot chain link fence complete with a top rail all the way around the coop and began to cover the roof of the pen with chicken wire.  Sadly, I ran out of chicken wire and left a few holes in the top, but I judged that it should be sufficient protection. 

It actually takes from about April to November for hens to mature enough to begin laying.  The investment in birds and pens and feed and water make it only attractive if you aren’t concerned with the per-egg cost.  Buying 5 dozen eggs at a time from Costco is far cheaper than raising your own, and you don’t even have to walk in the chicken poop, but since Carolyn had already borne the expense of raising them almost to laying age, I gratefully accepted 5 hens and rooster from her and put them in my new safe-and-secure chicken enclosure.  A sweet lady at work had grown tired of her declining flock, and gave me her last two hens, so all told I had 7 birds.

Three nights ago I put on my snow boots to wade through the icy accumulation and down the hill to the chicken pen to bring the anxiously waiting chickens the kitchen scraps.  I opened the garage door and cackled to the silence, but got no answer which was unusual.  I looked down the hill to see a large black shape in the corner of the pen.  I took a couple of steps in that direction, and a huge owl tried to fly out of the pen through the unfinished roof.  He finally succeeded and landed in a Cottonwood tree, silhouetted in the moonlight, and grudgingly watched me remove the two headless hens that he had killed. 

I locked the other chickens in the hen house and the next day in 15 degrees and 10 inches of snow, finished the roof on the chicken pen.


I believe they are finally secure, but the owl has put a little fear in them and they have only been coming out far enough to eat a little snow before retreating to the safety of the hen house.  The temperature is dropping and there were no eggs tonight, so I had a serious talk with the girls.  They need to do their part in all of this effort.

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