Bought a house - previous owner moved to a town home so we kept the chickens. There is a decent amount of space on the property, and half of it is a forested hillside.
Any suggestions for a newbie? A new coop is definitely first thing on my list. And a fence around the property.
One of the chickens is an outcast and I feel bad for her, doesn’t leave the coop when the others go out in the yard and doesn’t eat treats from the ground just food from the feeder. The other chickens get along well it seems.
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Look into ways to kill chickens humanely. It might be required to reduce an animals suffering or to keep the rest of your flock disease free. If you feel that you can not kill a chicken, then you should think about giving them up for adoption.
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Pickup a book about chicken diseases, a chicken that doesn’t eat treats or scratch/peck at the ground might be a sick chicken. I recommend The Chicken Health Handbook, 2nd Edition. Obviously, you should buy a copy if you find it helpful.
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Take note of the local predators. If you got bears for instance it might greatly change how you want to build that replacement coop and pen.
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After reading your comments in this post I suggest you look into what you might need to provide your flock with the correct nutrition. Chickens need grit since they dont have teeth, so look into that. Also an often overlooked thing is calcium which you can supplement with crushed oyster shell but there are also other alternatives, some that may be used both as grit and calcium like calcium carbonate (altho this is often debated). Just make sure your chickens are eating enough and have hard eggshells. Try to see if there is a local feed store by you to understand your options. Also, with the amount of chickens you have it might be better to consider making your own feed. This woukd require you sourcing, storing, and mixing it all yourself which takes effort and real estate but it will also save you a lot of money and might even give your chickens fresher more nutritious food.
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There are apps that can help you set recurring alarms for different levels of sunset. I use Suntimes so I have an alarm at the start of golden hour each day, which gives me time to observe the flock and still get them inside before it’s too dark
Beginning your message with “look into ways to kill chickens” is diabolical 💀
Unfortunately some people aren’t aware of the realities of owning barnyard animals so it’s better to say it so people who aren’t aware become aware. They aren’t pets so you have to treat them a little differently.
I’ve met people who studied to become a nurse only to discover that they faint at the sight of blood. People need to be aware of their limits before investing into something that’s not for them.
There’s an entire British comedy series with 10 seasons on this premise. It’s called Doc Martin, where a guy with such a fear leaves his job as a surgeon to become a GP in a remote cornish village.
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Make sure you clean the coop often. Chicken shit when it builds up is fucking rank. Cleaning a bunch of it is one of the worst jobs i’ve ever had to do. So much fucking ammonia. If you keep up with it then it won’t be a problem though.
Make sure they are solidly locked in their coop at night or predators will eat them. They probably know to go inside. It is up to you to lock the door.
Yes, definitely found out the hard way that if I left it too long some would try to go to sleep in the trees. And it’s a pain in the arse to get them out of the trees.
Alarm now gets set to remind me to herd them back in before that happens.
There are all sorts of automated accessories like doors for the coop that can make this very easy for you!
The chicken that’s an outcast might be going broody. Had one that started isolating herself like that till one day she went full broody. It was a pain but we managed to mostly break her out of it.
Keep the rooster separated from the hens unless you want more chickens.
Clip the feathers of only one wing, this is more effective to limit their flight than clipping both wings.
Make sure the rooster is not gay.
A scoop of mash, a scoop of scratch, and a handful crushed oyster shell every morning.
I’ve heard of the oyster shell, do they really need that much?
At the moment we have a back of pellets that the previous owner left. I’ll look into getting the mash and scratch. Are they supplementary to the pellets or an alternative?
Also got some black soldier fly larvae as I noticed an empty bag of them laying around. They seemed to really like those.
I fed my chicken their own well crushed egg shells.
I had an overly complicated process of first microwaving the eggshells so they’d be super dry and crispy, then whizzing them in an old blender dedicated to the job of grinding eggshells. Hens liked it rougher, but the ducks demanded shells ground to powder so they could do the ducky thing of scooping up a bunch, dipping it in water, and then muddling it into a milky sauce that they splattered all over. Ducks are sooo messy compared to chickens.
I prefer to add eggshells to my compost so my plants get calcium since eggshells are easy to pulverize with a atick or muddle and supplement calcium for the chickens with calcium carbonate or baked oyster/clamshells. The clamshells are a lot harder to break, you have to bake them well to get them as brittle as oystershells but it’s cheaper.
Oyster shell is for calcium. Their eggs shells will get thin and weak without it. Yes, they LOVE dried grubs, but that gets expensive. If the flock is roosting in the trees, some grubs will usually bring them down immediately.
Make sure that you leave a small pile of pea gravel somewhere. They’ll fill their gizzard with it to help digest things.
They don’t need a ton, but if they don’t get ithe oyster shell the eggs become increasingly fragile until they break when laid. Letting them free range gives them good bugs and nutrients. They lay less on the winter. You may want to consider something to heat the coop a bit in the winter depending on where you live. We tossed out a lot of table scraps since they eat anything, even chicken and egg shells.
Remember when Link would attack one of the hens?
Yeah, don’t do it.
We’ve all seen how it ends.
Watch for if foxes or martens can dig under your fence.
Feed em’
To me
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Kill the rooster now. Your neighbors will thank you.
Thankfully the nearest neighbour is about 500ft away, one of the attractions to this place.
I have some roosters in the neighborhood and I find them quite charming so not everyone hates them.
I don’t agree with killing the rooster for the neighbors sake, but 500ft is not nearly enough to drown out the sound of a rooster
No I think they meant kill it before the rooster grows too big, like bigger than you. They start forming gangs with other large animals. Roughing up and backhanding smaller animals. At that point they become much harder to kill since they are part looney toon. They are an absolute menace, do yourself that favor now.
That chicken is now a Senator from Kentucky in his 10th term.
Roosters are very loud. I’ve lived in two houses where some neighbor asshole had roosters.
Some people don’t mind the sound of roosters. I grew up on a farm so to me they’re just the sound of morning.
In my experience Roosters cockadoodledo all day long; not just the mornings.
