Backyard Chickens (and Other Birds)

These are the nesting boxes in our main chicken house. This pair of 4 box banks are mounted on the wall using French cleats. These nest boxes can be lifted off the wall and shaken out. They can be replaced by lifting them into place and setting them back onto the cleats. The sloped roofs keep chickens from roosting on top. The perches give them somewhere to stand before settling into a box.

I strongly urge everyone to consider French cleats. They make chicken keeping much easier.

This is the end pen of our brooding house. The brooding house is a 16' x 8' hoop house. It has a pair of 2 1/2' x 6' pens and a 2 1/2' x 2' pen on the right and the same on the left except the 2 1/2' x 2' pen is two storeys. The back pen is 6' x 8'. We use the brooding house for broody hens, hens and chicks, and brooding day old chicks, ducklings, and poults. We have a number of fenced holding yards with 6' fences. When this picture was taken we had a mixed layer replacement cohort waiting to join our main laying flock. Young turkeys were in the large yard next door and had just started to fly. A Mini White decided to return to the brooding house where it spent its first few weeks.

A group of new recruits to our laying flock. These birds are in the upper pen of our main house. We use the upper pen for chicks because the main house is the most protected housing we have. The have heat lamps and Cozy Coop panels. We also have automatic water up there when the chicks are old enough to use it.

Our laying flock ranges between 30 and 50 birds throughout the year.

We have some ISA Browns, Wyndottes, and Buff Orpingtons. I want to say this might have been one of the buffs? Any ideas lemmyfolk?

So my sister-in-law was watching my chickens while I was out of town. In addition to totally spoiling them with frozen fruit rings and fruit on skewers, she takes a ton of pictures and videos to send to me, which I love.

Now her and I are very opposite when it comes to many things, but the one thing we both love is watching RuPaul's drag race (please don't hate). So she sent me the above picture. Figured you all might appreciate it.

In addition to our year round layer flock, three pet ducks, and two batches of between 50 and 100 meat birds per year, we also raise a few turkeys. We have 18 this year. Here they are picking at some vines I threw into their holding yard before I let them out in the morning.

I have no idea what breed she's supposed to be. The neighbor we got her from said silky, but I know that isn't right. Only chickens I've ever had anything to do with were leghorns and reds at my uncle's place. And she's definitely not either of those.

She's about 3 months old, enjoys scratching, pecking, rubs behind the head, and eating bugs.

I still can't believe I got suckered into this lol. But the neighbor wasn't taking care of his birds at all, and this one got sent to what was supposed to be a petting zoo, but turned out to be just a damn open field next to a highway with a three foot high fence and all kinds of nastiness. Which is a whole thing by itself now. May end up housing some goats if the place gets shut down

But, anyway, the neighbor got her back because I threatened him with heavy metal all day and night if he didn't. Which is an ongoing joke, not an actual threat.

Really chill compared to the longhorns I had to feed though. Those biddies were bossy and prone to pecking ankles. This girl just hangs around us, then follows me though the yard while I'm piddling. Occasionally flaps at the back door until one of us gives her some attention, then goes back to scratching and petting.

With her being more of an adoptee/pet type of situation, she's got the tentative name of Sesame because she liked the sound of it when we were joking about calling her by chicken food names. I said Sesame and she got all perky and jumped on my lap. I guess it's the sibilance.

Anyway, she's not a working bird, and not anything unusual, but I figured y'all might get a laugh out of some idiot taking in a bird like this

Especially on a hot summer day!

Not sure if this counts as my back yard tho 😉

This is a classic Cornish Rock. They're the standard broiler chicken that you buy in the grocery store in a Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic. They eat a ridiculous amount of food, produce a ridiculous amount of waste, and grow ridiculously fast. These birds can go from day old to slaughter in as little as six weeks.

In general, when they arrive at the abattoir they look like hell. They're dirty, only partially feathered, and can often barely walk.

If you take care of them, though, controlling their feed intake and making sure that their accommodations are clean, you can actually produce a decent looking Cornish Rock.

I'm always amused when the first line inspector comes and asks to take a look and says, "Those are nice looking birds." Thanks.

This year we ordered our spring chicks early and our abattoir decided to start processing two weeks later than usual. That meant that our Cornish Rocks were finished two weeks before we could have them processed. We picked out the largest birds and processed them ourselves then cut back on their feed, made sure they had LOTS of clean water, and cleaned their bedding every two days.

The birds our abattoir processed finished, in the bag, with no water in the cavity (like you get at the grocery store) averaging 3.5 Kg (8 lb) and topping out at 4.5 Kg (10 lb). That's getting up into turkey range.

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