Backyard Chickens (and Other Birds)

Most days these past few weeks our ladies start taking to the bushes and trees come bedtime. The occasional marten is known to come by at night from time to time, so we used to pluck the chickens from the trees in the evenings, and guide them to their coop.

I got tired of it, so I set up a garden hose, and now magically it starts raining once they settle down for a night in the trees. Gets them to seek shelter in their coop pretty well. Also, I'm not the bad guy for plucking them off anymore.

This is how we water our chickens year round. In 2020 I put in water and power underground to our little chicken house. The chicken house it 2.5 m (8') x 3.75 m (12'). This is a Little Giant automatic water bowls from Miller Hatcheries. They use a pneumatic tire valve core (like in your bicycle or car tire), a spring, and two locking nuts to set the water level in the bowl. They're super nice to use because you just take them off, swirl them, dump them, rub them with your hand, rinse them (we just push the bowl up on the pin in the valve core to get a bit of water), and put them back on and they're good to go. It takes less than a minute per bowl.

I have added heat tape to the pipe coming up from the ground to the house and on the plumbing in the house right down to the bowl. It generally stays thawed until around -10C. After that the valve and water in the bowl freeze but it takes around a minute with a heat gun to get it running again. I keep a heat gun in the chicken house for the purpose.

I will be moving to a house with a bigger garden soon, and I want to keep some chickens and ducks. I've been looking at coops from this brand: Omlet because they look easy to clean. I had rabbits before, and the wooden rabbit houses you can buy were always bad quality and hard to clean well. Any advice you guys can give me?

Our laying flock is mixed. We have some purebred chickens and some mutts. Some years we hatch our own. Other years we buy chicks from other farms we trust. We also buy day olds and ready-to-lays from Freys and Mill Pond.

One of the things you learn in your second or third year of keeping a small laying flock is that you need to maintain your flock each year. We rotate out some of our oldest birds and add new birds each year. We identify the different groups in our flock with one or more nylon ties on their legs. This year's RTLs have a black band on their left leg.

Most of the chickens ran outside this morning when I opened the chicken door. I let them out then go inside to do chores. This morning as I was filling the feed can a few of the ladies came in to inspect what I was doing. They're not hungry. The feeder is never empty. They just don't want to miss out on an opportunity to eat from the top of the feeder while it sits on the floor.

You will notice that the girl in the left foreground has a nylon tie on her leg. We identify the different groups in our flock with one or more nylon ties on their legs. This year's RTLs have a black band on their left leg. This helps us keep track of who is oldest so that we can rotate out a few of the oldest birds each year as we replace them with younger birds.

Made out of wooden pallets and remaining of roof covering material. Automatic solar door + building on stilts to prevent fox attack

Made out of wooden pallets and remaining of roof covering material. Automatic solar door + building on stilts to prevent fox attack

We do two batches of between 50 and 100 Cornish Rocks per year. We start the first batch early in the spring so that they finish before the heat of summer. We do the second batch late in the year so that we can take advantage of the late summer heat and they finish after it starts to cool down.

We use 250W heat lamps and 200W Cozy Coop panels to keep the littles warm. We generally have a very low loss rate.

This year our abattoir started two weeks later than usual so we ended up having our spring batch for two weeks longer than anticipated. Our largest bird finished at 4.5 Kg (10 lb).

We generally process around half of the birds ourselves for our freezer and have the other half processed at a licensed abattoir so that we can sell them off farm.

These were laid by Azure Blues, a blue egg laying variety of White Leghorn.

Adult female hand for scale

INB4 - Rule 5! It's not a calcium deficiency. This is an egg from an older bird with insufficient albumen to support the shell during its formation. There are a number of things that can cause this including dehydration, illness, and the number one cause, old age. This is a perfectly good shell, it's just wrinkled.