Meet the Flock Roundup – July 2017

Suddenly, after celebrating her one-month birthday, Paula the Salmon Faverolles chick is starting to look like a teenage chicken. Look at the feathers sprouting all over her legs & her pretty salmon colored wing feathers!

Squawky the Speckled Sussex chick looks longingly out the window at the great wide world. A week after this shot, the chicks had their first opportunity to go outside!

Meet the Flock Roundup – May & June, 2017

Meet Veronica the Easter Egger, a prolific layer of green eggs. Veronica's in her 5th year and was the only Easter Egger of her generation to lay continuously through this past winter. Such a hard worker! And very pretty to boot!

Getting Your Ducks in a Row for Raising Baby Chicks: Eight Questions and Answers

The expression "taking them under your wing” is one of about a million idiomatic phrases that originated with poultry keeping.  I’m sure you know what it means and I’m willing to bet that you’ve used the phrase yourself more than once.  But just in case you’ve never heard the expression, it means to nurture and protect those who are inexperienced, young, or in need of protection—just as mother hen nurtures and protects her baby chicks and gathers them under her protective wing.  When you adopt baby chicks, you’re taking these small, helpless, peeping balls of fluff under your wing.  It’s a big responsibility, and if you’ve never done it before, you should make sure you understand the list of basics before you undertake this big venture.  If you have done it before, it’s good to pull out that list and review it just to make sure you have all your ducks in a row (I’m mixing metaphors here, but it does present an interesting mental image!).  Raising baby chicks is not hard, after all, but there are a few things you have to consider and a few things you need to do right. 

I'll be publishing this post on June 5, and shortly after I post it, my wife, Kathy, and I will get in the car and set off on our quest for baby chicks.  If you’re reading it the day I post it, you can imagine us somewhere on I-35 headed south from Minnesota to Webster City, Iowa to pick up chicks at the Murray McMurray Hatchery.  Or maybe we’re on the way home and I’m holding a box of peeping fluff balls on my lap.  You can be sure that getting these babies was not a spontaneous decision.  What follows is a list of the questions I've asked myself and the answers I've come up with before getting these babies. I think these questions and answers will be useful to you if you're considering getting chicks for the first time, or if you're adding to your existing flock. There’s lots of useful information on the web about caring for baby chicks, and every time I’ve gotten chicks I’ve taken the time beforehand to sample from the collective knowledge of all those people who have raised chicks and written about it.  I’m including a lot of links to all those folks in this post.  It takes a village, don’t you know, to raise a chick. 

1 - Do I want chickens?  This is the obvious first thing you consider. If you’ve thought about owning chickens, you probably already realize that becoming a chicken owner will put you at the forefront of the local/sustainable food movement.  You’ll be producing food right in your own backyard!  If you already produce food in your backyard with a garden, chickens are a natural complement to that garden—the chickens will happily devour any leftover vegetable scraps and weeds you give them and all that composted chicken manure will make for some very happy garden plants!  Also, any chickens you keep will, without a doubt, be better treated and happier than the majority of the hens laying the eggs you find at the grocery store.  So, does it make you happy to imagine a small flock of hens clucking contentedly in your backyard?  If you immediately answer “yes” to that question, you’ve jumped the first hurdle!  That was the easy one!  Of course if you already have chickens the question becomes, “Do I want more, chickens?”  The answer to that question is always “yes”, naturally.

Eggshells in a Nutshell: Brown Eggs

What's Up With Brown Eggs?

• Brown eggs are brown because of protoporphyrin-IX, a pigment that’s produced in cells lining a hen’s oviduct.
• Protoporphyrin-IX is made from an iron-containing chemical called heme that comes from broken-down red blood cells.
• Some brown-shelled eggs have pigments added to the hard testa layer of the egg shell, but most eggs have the bulk of their pigment added with the bloom—the “paint” layer that goes on right before a hen lays an egg.
• Because the bloom is still wet when the egg is laid, you can wipe much of the color off of a freshly laid egg.
• Because the pigment of most brown eggs is in the bloom, the insides of most brown eggshells are white.
• Different breeds add different amounts of pigment to their eggshells, for example, Black Copper Marans lay eggs that are a deep, dark chocolate, while Barred Plymouth Rocks lay very light brown eggs.
• There is no nutritional difference between brown eggs, white eggs, or eggs of any other color.  A factor that does influences the nutritional value of an egg is the diet of the hen that laid it.

Learn about white eggs here!
Learn about blue and green eggs here!

Brown egg courtesy of Maran the Cuckoo Marans Hen

A few of the brown-egg-laying Hipster Hens

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“Meet the Flock” Roundup—September & October, 2016

Meet Darcy Barred Rock, the fourth hen in the quartet of Barred Rock hens that rule the Hipster Hen roost. Darcy isn’t super friendly like Arlene, she isn’t super clever like Barbara, and she isn’t super bossy like Charlie. She is, perhaps, one of those individuals who would be characterized by all observers as “the other one”. But I don’t think Darcy cares. I think she knows that she’s SORT OF friendly and clever—and maybe just a little bit bossy. And other than that she’s happy to be the hen that goes about her business of laying one of those nice brown eggs nearly every day!

Meet Emile, the birchen Cochin rooster. Well, actually, you’ve already met Emile. This is a recent picture that I like quite a bit that I had to share—Emile in all his roosterly splendor!

Meet Emily, the plump and personable black Silkie hen. Emily really does have eyes but they’re hard to see because they’re sort of hidden in her fluff and they’re black--just like the rest of her. Emily’s eyes, and the rest of her for that matter, are hard to photograph. She just sort of absorbs all the light and ends up looking like a silhouette. I haven’t ever taken a picture that I feel does her justice, but she’s so darn cute I’m gonna keep trying!

Emily the Silkie stares contemplatively through the chicken run fence on a nice fall day.

Meet Maran the cuckoo Marans hen. She’s pictured here with her constant companion, Carmen Maranda. Maran and Carmen are in their third year—these two girls and Angitou the golden Polish hen joined the flock as babies in the summer of 2014 and came from Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa. Marans can come in nine different colors, but Maran and Carmen’s cuckoo color is the most common in the US. In addition to being pretty birds, my Marans hens lay beautiful dark chocolate brown eggs.

Here's Carmen Maranda and Maran the cuckoo Marans hens as kids in the summer of 2014, along with their friend Angitou the golden Polish hen.

Meet Marissa the Cream Legbar. I captured this picture of Marissa in August—about the time she started laying eggs. Since then, Marissa has laid a pretty little blue-green pullet egg almost every day, and each egg is incrementally larger than the previous one. My older hens have scaled waaay back on egg production lately, since they’ve started their fall molt. So many days the four eggs I get from my four young Legbar hens outnumber the eggs I get from the rest of the flock!

Here’s Jennifer, my fourth year white crested black Polish hen.  Jennifer was so sick that I removed her from the flock for a while in late September, but she did a rapid and spectacular bounce-back and I’m happy to report that she’s completely recovered now.  I was sure that Jennifer would be eager to model the new chicken sweaters, but she apparently felt otherwise.

In Memorium:  Sweet Roxie the Rhode Island Red.  Gone but not forgotten.

Social Engineering in the Coop – The Arlene Denouement

The more behavioral scientists study domestic chickens the more they come to appreciate their high intelligence and their complex social structure.  Chickens “talk” to each other with a large number of different vocalizations, each with its own meaning.  They show complex thinking in decision making—they take into account prior experience as well as their knowledge about their current situation.  They exhibit self-assessment, and make comparisons between themselves and other chickens in their flock.  They understand the rank of each chicken in the pecking order of their flock, which demonstrates logical reasoning ability. They engage in group activity when they forage and defend themselves.  They demonstrate long-term relationship-building (i.e. friendship) that requires long-term memory.  Author Annie Potts states “It now appears that the cognitive processes involved in representational thinking in chickens are similar to those required for associative learning in humans.”  The fact that chickens think like us is disturbing when you consider how the vast majority of domestic chickens are treated.  But it is also intriguing to think that just as we humans are subjected to subtle social manipulations by Madison Avenue and political campaigns, that chickens, too, can be socially manipulated, because they think like we do. 

"Meet the Flock" Roundup - July & August, 2016

Meet Snowball the Silkie Rooster. This personable little roo has an amazingly long back story for one so young and fluffy. In 2013 I picked three baby chicks out of a batch of straight run fluffy-footed chicks at a local feed store. “Straight run” means that the chicks had not been sexed, so their gender was unknown. “Fluffy-footed” means just that –these chicks would turn into chickens that would have feathers all the way down their legs and on their feet. In my inexperience, I was hoping for three Silkie hens. I’m glad I was not playing the lottery that day, since all three chicks became roosters. Two of them were not even Silkies – early on I figured out that Emile and Paul were roosters (like when they started crowing!), and that they were both bantam Cochins. Snowball was the only Silkie. Sexing baby chicks is difficult – it requires the ability to see minor variations in the baby chicks’ cloacae. It’s so difficult to sex chicks that it is considered as much art as science, and is only done by professionals. Baby Silkies display such minor cloacal differences that it’s pretty much impossible to sex them at all. So you have to wait until they’re approaching maturity before you have any idea if they’re hens or roosters. And Snowball was a late bloomer. We were well into the fall when Snowball got up one day, looked around, and crowed. Unfortunately, since Paul and Emile had declared their roosterhood weeks before Snowball got around to it, crowing was exactly the wrong thing for him to do. Every day from that point on, Snowball’s life became an exercise in escaping the wrath of the other two roosters. Even the hens became hostile to him and soon everybody was picking on him. In due course, he was afraid to leave the roost – even to eat or drink. I started putting him by the water font so he would drink under my protection and I would hold him on my lap and feed him out of my hand. That kept him alive, but his was a pretty pathetic existence. Eventually I built a small 4x4 coop just for him, complete with a sign proclaiming, “SNOWBALL’S SWINGIN’ BACHELOR PAD”. He lived there by himself for about a year. Then, in 2014 I built a second coop which became Snowball’s new home and since then I’ve gradually introduced more chickens to that coop. Today, Coop 2 is home to two Silkie hens, a golden Polish hen, a buff Orpington, and the four teenage Cream Legbars. And Snowball is lord of the manor!

Meet Betty the Easter Egger! Easter Eggers are not a true breed. Rather, they are a cross of a variety of different breeds with Auracanas, a South American breed that lays blue eggs. Auracanas lay blue eggs by adding biliverdin, a hemoglobin byproduct, to their eggshells. Easter Eggers can lay eggs that range from blue to olive green. This sweet hen used to be a regular layer of pretty light-green eggs, but has not laid an egg since last fall. At age three, she’s only middle-aged, but I suspect that Betty may have opted for early retirement!

Meet Bonnie the Cream Legbar pullet! Bonnie is one of the baby chicks I got at the end of March and is unique because she doesn’t have a tail. Poultry people refer to this condition as “rumplessness” and in addition to no tail feathers, rumpless chickens are also lacking a tailbone. There are breeds of rumpless chickens, but Legbars are not one of those breeds, so I don’t know what’s going on with Bonnie. At first I was chalking it up to the Auracana (a rumpless South American breed) genetics in Cream Legbars, but after doing some more reading I now realize that when R.C. Punnett developed the Cream Legbar in the 1930's he didn't use Auracanas per se - the blue egg and the crest genes came from a "yellow-brown colored, crested Chilean hen"—no mention of the hen not having a tail. I’ve exchanged emails with the breeder that Bonnie came from and she is surprised – this has never occurred in her chickens before. I suppose that this must be a spontaneous mutation, which makes Bonnie very special. I expect once she’s a little older she’ll develop super powers.

Here's another picture of Bonnie enjoying a little leaf tidbit in the chicken run.

Meet Buffy the Buff Orpington hen. Buffy is in her fourth year, but maintains her girlish figure and turns out a continuous stream of those lovely brown eggs. She does stop laying eggs on occasion and goes broody. She actually is the only non-Silkie hen in my flock that has bouts of broodiness. I'm hatching a plan (no pun intended, of course!) to put her broodiness to good purpose by using her as the broody hen for next year’s batch of chicks.

Meet Carmen Maranda the cuckoo Marans and Mary the golden Campine. This is not a fabulous picture of either hen, but it’s a great juxtaposition of the largest and smallest hens in the big coop. Carmen, as mild mannered as she is large, lays beautiful chocolate brown eggs and Mary, high-energy and aloof, lays petite white eggs.

Meet Charlie Barred Rock. Charlie is in her fourth year, and just between us, is kind of bossy and verbose. She never stops talking! How can any hen have so much to say? Charlie is the largest of the Barred Rocks and she is without a doubt the alpha hen in the flock, so maybe all that talk is just her reminding the other hens how cool she is.

Meet Courtney the white Silkie hen. If you’ve followed this blog for any time you may feel Courtney needs no introduction, since you no doubt followed the story of Courtney raising the batch of Cream Legbar chicks as their surrogate mom. But Courtney actually has a secret past! Courtney started life in an amazing local bookstore that is not only filled with tons of children’s books, but also a variety of animals for the kids to interact with. Courtney was known as Iggy Peck back then—a perfect name for a chicken living in a bookstore! While Courtney is the smallest chicken in my flock, she makes up for her size with her assertiveness, and apparently that part of her personality manifested itself in her previous life as well. She not only made life miserable for the other chicken in the store, a poor hen-pecked little rooster named Neal, but one fateful day she also pecked a toddler. It was a soft peck and the toddler was not harmed, but Courtney lost her job selling books that day. So then she came to live here at the ranch. The bookstore folks report that since “Iggy Peck” left, Neal has blossomed into a happy, outgoing rooster that loves the attention that all of the kids bestow on him. And Courtney has become a Hipster Hen and a mom! So this is a story with happy ending for everybody!

Coop News—Slightly Out of Date

Here we are in the dog days of summer.  Pretty much everybody thinks of the dog days of the summer as that part of summer where the weather is so hot and humid that our lethargy reaches its peak and all we want to do is hang out in a cool and shady spot away from the mosquitoes, like an old lazy dog.  If I were a dog I think I might be offended by the phrase.  In fact “dog days” original meaning had nothing to do with lazy dogs, and I’m going to share it with you now so you can tell all your friends and impress them with your knowledge.

The constellation Canis major (direct translation from Latin:  “big dog”) contains the star Sirius, which is often described as being the dog’s nose.  Sirius is also referred to as the Dog Star and is one of the brightest stars in the sky.  During July and the first part of August, this bright star rises into the sky almost simultaneously with the sun, thus these days are called “the dog days.”  So now you’re impressed with my knowledge, right?  Well, don’t thank me, thank Google.

My wife and I are taking a “dog days” vacation to escape the heat and humidity and will be camping on the north shore of Lake Superior.  Since Lake Superior is such a huge body of cold water, it creates its own weather system and one can count on the temperature being at least ten degrees cooler by the lake, so it will be great.  The chickens, sadly, are not coming along and will have to deal with the heat and humidity in the care of our chicken sitter.  They wouldn’t have much fun anyway—there’s no place to roost in a tent.

I’ve prepared this post in advance, and will just need to pull my laptop out of the car at some roadside coffee shop with wi-fi, click a button, and this post will magically appear on my blog.  Ah, the joys of modern technology!  One can blog in the wilderness!  All one needs is a wilderness coffee shop with wi-fi!  So here’s the coop news, only a few days out of date:

Speaking of the weather, Minnesota continues to be hit by summer storms.  The latest one took down a small tree and a few large limbs.  Considering that I’ve got more than a few acres where trees and limbs could fall and not hit anything it is both ironic and frustrating that they seem to keep falling on structures.  As you can see, this one landed squarely on my new chicken run tractor gate.  I’ve been told that trees falling in the woods make no sound.  When I found this large limb on my gate, I made several sounds.  I got the limb taken care of relatively quickly, but it was a few days before I could get the gate repaired, so there was a huge gaping hole for that period of time.  I told the chickens that it was beyond my control and that they were on their honor not to fly through the hole and escape.  Amazingly, that somehow worked.  The gate is fixed now and all of the chickens still live here!

The broody rehab crate is once again in use.  Emily the Silkie tucked herself away in the depths of a nest box with the idea that she needed to hatch something.  Since no eggs were available, she was actually sitting on a small piece of cast-off cantaloupe rind.  It was sort of round and vaguely egg-shaped, but still sort of a pathetic grasping at straws, I felt.  So I put her in jail.  She’s recuperating and hopefully will be back with the other chickens before we leave on vacation.

Sweet Arlene Barred Rock continues to recover from her molt, lameness, and the battering she got from some of the other chickens.  She’s living by herself in the open area of the pole barn and whenever I go into the barn she always runs to greet me.  Maybe she’s just looking for treats, but I like to think that she’s being friendly.  Once we’re back from our vacation, I’ll try reintroducing her to the flock again, hopefully with a better outcome than last time, so stay tuned for that!

Finally, here are some new pictures of the Legbar pullets.  They’re starting to look so beautiful and grown-up!  They’re finally calming down a little, and will actually eat out of my hand now.  I’m sure we’re just a few weeks away from those first blue eggs!

Bonnie the Cream Legbar

Paulette the Cream Legbar

Marissa the Cream Legbar

Nicky the Cream Legbar

Pecking Order/The Further Adventures of Arlene

In 1904, there was a ten-year-old boy living in Norway named Thorleif.  In addition to having a really cool name, Thorleif was also a very keen observer of the things that happened around him.  He was utterly captivated by a flock of chickens that his parents had given him and spent hours watching them interact.  In 1921, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe used the observations that he had collected since childhood on the dominance hierarchy in chickens as the basis for his doctoral dissertation.  Since his doctoral paper was published in German, he used the term “Hackordnung” to describe this chicken behavior.  When his paper was published in English in 1927, this term was translated as “pecking order.”  “Pecking order” has now seeped into popular usage to the point that it not only describes social interaction in people, but also an economic theory, a card game, and a chicken restaurant in Florida.  As a matter of fact the term has become such a part of the common lexicon that most people have forgotten, or never knew, that it has anything to do with chickens.

Thorleif (Oslo Museum)

But chickens do peck each other.  They have pointed beaks, and their beaks are their main weapon.  In the most extreme situation, chickens can peck each other to death.  That's unusual, though, and most chickens in most flocks go through the day without major squabbles.  That's not to say, though, that chickens are Kumbayah clucking pacifists.  There is a social structure and chickens are constantly trying to move up the ladder.  The top chickens get their pick of the prime spots on the very top of the roost and get to eat the choicest treats for as long as they like.  The bottom chickens find the best spot on the roost they can, and get any leftover treats that the ruling chickens don't want.  And while pecking is involved in maintaining the social norm, it doesn't always come to that - usually a dirty look from a more dominant hen is all that's required for the weaker hen to back down.

The flock of sixteen birds in my big coop actually contains two pecking orders.  There are fourteen hens and two roosters in the flock, and whenever a flock contains more than one rooster, there is a pecking order for the roosters that is distinct and separate from the hen pecking order.  With only two roosters, it’s pretty easy to see how things fall out for them.  Emile is the top banana.  Then, there’s the small auxiliary rooster, sad little Paul, the frizzled bantam Cochin.  Emile has his way with the ladies whenever and wherever he likes.  Paul will occasionally flirt with one of the hens, and if that hen is not one of Emile’s favorites, or if Emile’s feeling magnanimous, he’ll ignore the situation.  But if Paul puts a move on Emile’s best girl, or if Emile is in a foul (ahem…fowl) mood, he’ll chase Paul around the coop until Paul finds a good place to hide or Emile decides he’s tired.  This goes on every day and will not stop as long as both roosters are healthy and occupying the same flock at the same time.

The dynamic of the fourteen hens is a little more complicated.  I could tell you in general who the top hens and bottom hens are, but to actually make a list of the hens from top to bottom would be very difficult because there is constant shuffling going on.  A hen will move up or down a position due to some subtle interaction that either I don’t witness or I see but don't realize the implications.  In general, I’m positive that Arlene, Barbara, Charlie, and Darcy—the four Barred Rocks—make up the ruling elite.  In general, Barred Rock hens are intelligent, curious, and adventurous, and are most often the alpha hens in any flock.

Roosting time is the best time to watch flock dynamics.  Emile goes to bed early on the top rung and one by one the hens jump onto the roost to join him.  Paul knows that Emile is loath to get up once he’s settled in for the night, so he knows this is his big chance to troll the coop for acquiescent hens.  Each hen, meanwhile, works her way up the roost to the top rung and carefully examines the hens already sitting there to see if there is a hen near her status that she can roost by.  If the top rung is already full, she looks for a hen she can force to move down.  If a hen is not happy with who she winds up roosting by, she’ll not so subtly shove her body against her roost neighbor and try to force her to move.  If that strategy doesn’t work, she’ll casually start pecking the other hen’s toes.  The pecking escalates to the body, the neck, the head, and finally the comb.  Combs are sensitive, vulnerable, and bleed easily, so the conflict usually ends before it reaches that point when the weaker hen reluctantly moves to a lower rung.  Occasionally, if the lower hen feels she can take on the hen challenging her and move up a peg on the pecking order, a full-scale hen fight can ensue, which often ends with Emile’s intervention.

While all this shuffling and sorting out is taking place, the Barred Rocks are still lazily scratching through the coop bedding, or pecking feed.  They know that when they decide to go to bed, they’ll pick any spot on the roost that they damn well please.

And this is the law of the coop.  It may offend your sense of fairness and democracy, but it’s a system that works, and without a system there would be constant bloody conflict.  There are several situations that cause the system to break down.  One is when I introduce a new hen to the flock.  That hen has to fight for a position in the pecking order, or be mercilessly bullied by all of the other hens all of the time.  Putting a couple of new hens into the mix always causes a kerfuffle that lasts for several days, and when the dust and feathers finally settle, the new pecking order can look very different from the old one.  A second situation is when a hen dies.  The sudden death of Rhoda the Rhode Island Red last week opened up a position in the hierarchy and there was conflict.  Some hens moved up, and interestingly, some hens moved down.  A third situation is when a hen is injured.  Hens that rank below her immediately press their advantage.  Recall last week’s post about Arlene and Rhoda.  Both hens, when they were ill, felt safer on the ground, outdoors, with evening approaching, than in the coop with other hens that would probably pick a fight.  A fourth situation is when a hen is temporarily removed from the flock.  When she goes back, she has to regain her position in the scheme of things.  And that brings us to Arlene.

You’ll recall from last week’s post that Arlene has been under the weather with a lame right leg compounded by a hard molt.  She’s been gradually recuperating and on Thursday night at roosting time, I decided it was time to move Arlene back to the coop with the other hens.  I swung open the door separating her corner pen from the rest of the coop and Arlene sauntered out.  Most of the hens didn’t react at all to Arlene’s reappearance among them, but there were a few that did, and it was interesting to see who they were.  First, Paul the pipsqueak rooster scurried up, bubbling with amorous excitement.  I interpreted his ardent clucking to mean, “Arlene!  You’ve been away!  I suspect that the decline in your fortunes means that Emile no longer finds you attractive.  But suddenly I find you so…..approachable!”  Right behind Paul were Arlene’s “friends”, Barbara and Charlie Barred Rock.  They seemed to be saying, “Hey, sister, looks like you’ve got a little limp going on.  That is sooo not cool!  While you were away we saved your spot.  NOT!  There’s no way we ever want to hang out with you again, so take a hike now, or you’ll be sorry!”  Of course chickens don’t really talk.  What they were actually doing was aggressively pecking Arlene.  While I realized that it was important for Arlene to get through the hazing and reintegrate into the flock, I also didn’t want the situation to get out of hand, so I waited it out in the coop as the chickens, one by one, found a place on the roost for the night.  Arlene eventually limped back into her old corner pen and roosted by herself.

I got up early Friday morning, but not early enough to be up with the chickens.  By the time I got to the coop the nasty behavior was once again in full swing—Paul was doing his Lothario routine and the mean girls were bullying.  Arlene was constantly on the move to avoid their attention and her limp was becoming more pronounced.  Also, her comb was bleeding in several places from hard pecks.  I said a few words under my breath, snatched up Arlene, put her back in the corner pen and shut the door.  

Arlene--with comb scabs after a "conversation" with the mean girls

And that’s where she is today.  While Arlene actually seems perfectly happy to be living by herself in the corner pen and with free run of the tractor alley, it isn't a good or permanent solution. She needs to eventually reintegrate with the flock. I'm going to give her some time for her leg to regain some strength and for her comb to heal and then I'll give my next plan a shot: I'll put Arlene back into the coop and do a little social engineering to help her fit in.  I have a plan!  Will my plan work?  Who knows - but it's worth a try.  Life in the coop never gets boring! 

Barbara Barred Rock

Charlie Barred Rock

Paul the amorous frizzled bantam Cochin roo

[This post has been shared on "Clever Chicks Blog Hop #222"]

Sometimes Hens Get Sick--Sometimes Hens Die

The bulk of the chickens in my flock are in their fourth year  - well past the age that most commercial laying hens are allowed to live.  And I know that chickens don't live forever.  Over the millennia that chickens have been domesticated, high egg production was the trait that was valued above all else—so that's the trait that was selected for.  Longevity wasn’t even considered, since chickens typically were slaughtered long before the end of their natural life.  Thus, chickens don’t have long lives. Laying an egg practically every day eventually wears a hen out.  It is highly probable that eventually something will go wrong with her complex, high production egg-laying machinery—the oviduct becomes infected; an egg becomes impacted; the oviduct breaks and leaks yolk into the abdominal cavity which becomes infected; tumors form—the list goes on.

When I was a kid on the farm, the problems of aging hens was not a problem because there were no aging hens.  Chickens raised for meat were slaughtered in their first year.  Laying hens were kept for two years and when their egg production slowed they became stew.  Old chickens and their health problems became a reality only recently, when people like me started keeping small backyard flocks.  We backyard chicken people bond with our chickens and our rationale for keeping them goes beyond eggs and meat.  We keep them for the pleasure of keeping them, and for the satisfaction that comes with nurturing them and giving them a good and happy life.  Chickens have become pets.  And that’s OK—chickens are fascinating, compelling, and beautiful animals.  But the grim reality that is interwoven with the many pleasures of keeping a flock of backyard hens is the anxiety and angst of dealing with the inevitable sick birds and the anguish when one of those sick birds dies. 

Hipster Hens Hate Heat!

At 7 PM, the temp in the coop was still hovering around 90 degrees

Like most of the country, we’re in the midst of a July heatwave here in Minnesota.  For the last several days the temps have been in the nineties and once you factor in the high humidity, the heat index has been in the 100’s.  Last night it only cooled down to the high seventies and this morning the temperature started rising with the sun.  If you live in Phoenix, I’m sure what I just described is business as usual.  But Minnesotans are about as used to and equipped for handling hot weather as folks in the South are used to and equipped for handling snow.

The heat has been pretty stressful for the hens.  The drop in egg production is proof of how stressed they are.  The egg count yesterday was one.  One single egg.  That egg was compliments of Veronica the Easter Egger.  The nest boxes are small and enclosed and hens give off heat. While she was sitting in the nest box she was sticking her head out of it as far as she could, her beak was open, and she was panting the entire time.  Laying that egg was miserable for her. 

Chickens have three main ways of getting rid of excess body heat.  One way is simply by radiating it away from their bodies from their skin surface. Chickens were domesticated from the Asian Red Jungle Fowl, a bird of the tropics whose body is designed for getting rid of heat.  The Red Jungle Fowl has a huge comb that has a rich blood supply and works just like a cooling fin by expelling lots of body heat.  Unfortunately, domestication has resulted in different shapes, sizes and feather patterns, and some of them are actually adaptations for cold weather, which means those chickens are less able to deal with heat.  Because combs can freeze in the winter, most of the chickens I’ve selected for my flock have combs that are small – great for winter, but bad for hot weather.  My Silkies and Cochins also hold more heat since they have feathers all the way down their legs and on their feet, again not a good trait for hot weather.  Last night when the hens were roosting, many of them were spreading their wings to increase their body surface area and dissipate as much body heat as they could, and many of the bigger and older hens were panting.  

Charlie Barred Rock pants

Panting is a second way chickens get rid of heat—the air they breathe out is hotter than the air they breathe in, so as the weather gets hot, the chickens pant to increase their air exchange.

Darcy Barred Rock spreads her wings to cool down

Maran the Cuckoo Marans hen takes an ungainly pose as she pants and spreads her wings

A third way chickens expel heat is to increase their water intake, just like humans.  Drinking more water works to cool us because we sweat and also because the urine we pass is warmer than the water we drink. Chicken’s bodies are very different from ours, so bear with me as I talk a little about biology.  First of all, chickens don’t sweat.  Sweating, contrary to what all those antiperspirant ads would have us believe, is a wonderful thing—it keeps us cool.  But since chicken don’t sweat, any heat transferred into the extra water they drink must be expelled by passing more urine, right?  But hold on!  Chickens don’t pee either!  Chicken’s kidneys produce uric acid which is eventually exits their body with their poop.  Chickens only have one opening in the back so everything – uric acid, poop, and eggs all enter the world from that one opening.  Which is very efficient but also maybe a little disgusting if you didn’t know that before.  But back on subject, chickens don’t pee, so they can’t transfer heat that way!  “Well,” you say, “We’re running out of options here!  So crap!”  “Bingo!” I say.  Chickens get rid of all that extra water by producing lots of loose, runny poop.  Welcome to the wonderful world of staying cool through diarrhea! This works great for the chicken, but can be disconcerting for the new flock owner uninitiated in the concept of excretory heat transfer (the technical term)!  And it can create some very foul fowl.  My sweet little fluffy white Silkie hen, Courtney, got a bath today because the back half of her body was drenched in—Ok that’s too much information.

(Please note:  I'm not providing a picture of the third type of heat transfer, much to the relief of all of us, I'm sure.)

So I’m doing what I can to keep the flock cool.  I have a huge industrial fan that blows air through the pole barn all day and well into the night.  I also have been replacing the water in the water fonts several times a day.  I get my water from a well, so it’s icy cold when it’s fresh.  

Large industrial fan

And yesterday, I decided to try a new trick.  I capped an old garden hose, hooked it up to the cold well water, snaked it through both chicken runs, and then used a nail to punch a bunch of holes in it.  It immediately started spraying a fine mist of cold water.

The chickens ran to the spraying water and joyously splashed around!  OK, the previous sentence is what I wanted to happen, but is, in fact, a complete lie.  The chickens were terrified by this strange new hissing snake-like thing in their run.  They all ran away from it like cats from a cucumber, dashed into the coop and cowered in a corner.  Eventually, one brave and smart chicken strode forth, started pecking at the spray, and decided that it was quite cool, delicious, and wonderful.  That chicken was Snowball the Silkie roo.  Perhaps I was witnessing evolution at work--the smart, brave chicken gets the water, thus survives.  After a while he went back into the coop and came back a short time later with his BHF (Best Hen Forever), Angitou.  How did she know to follow him?  I guess he must have told her!  Eventually all the chickens went back into the run.  Today they’re used to the hose and amble over frequently to cool down.  But there hasn’t been any joyous splashing.  My lesson learned:  Chickens are not ducks.

(There's a video of Snowball enjoying water from the hose on the "Randy's Chicken Blog" Facebook page.  Videos work better on Facebook, so I'm not embedding it here, but go please go over there and enjoy it!)

Hipster hens nonchalantly staying cool by the somewhat terrifying hose

While the temperature is in the mid-nineties again today, it is less humid.  Tomorrow we’re expecting highs in the eighties, so maybe the worse of this heat wave is over.  And as we Minnesotans say, “Next winter we’ll all be wishing for some of this warmth!”