Tales from the Chicken House

The difference between meat breeds and egg laying breeds

The cornish/rock cross meat chicks are fast outgrowing the egg layers.  This is expected of course, but it's still amazing to watch.  These birds are the same age and have been raised in the same conditions with the same food.

Bloody tail, a result of pecking injury

Chickens naturally peck at things.  When they are cramped into too close of a proximity, they peck each other, sometimes to death.  As I reported earlier in the week, the chicks were getting too crowded in their half of the hen house and the telltale bloody spots on wings and the base of the tail began to appear on some chicks.  So I gave them free run of the entire upper portion of the hen house.  This solved the issue and the spots began to heal.  Unfortunately, it also cut the hens off from access to the nest boxes.

Temporary nest "boxes"

I set up these two temporary nest "boxes" in the bottom of the house for them.

Buckets strewn about

The hens inspected the new nesting "boxes" and promptly scratched out all of the straw and pushed them around.  The displeasure was obvious.

Mislaid egg

To further state their point, one of them laid an egg nearby.

Wired in place with a large rock placed in front

I removed one bucket and wired the remaining one in place.  I replaced the straw and placed a large, flat rock along the front to keep them from scratching the straw out.  As you can see, they emptied the bucket again.  They are laying the eggs somewhere else in the yard, but darned if I can find where.  I assume the dogs are probably eating them.  Something had to be done to give the hens access to the nest boxes again.

Dogs put up in the garden area

I penned the dogs into the garden area to allow the chicks and hens to meet and see how they interacted before introducing the dogs to the chicks.  The dogs have done great around the full sized hensfor the last two years, but I was concerned that the smaller, more active chicks would trigger the killing instinct in the dogs.  They had killed a few a couple of years ago when I first got these chickens, before they got the message that these were not to be eaten.  I wanted to take that introduction slowly.  It turned out that I had nothing to worry about.  I placed a couple of chicks in front of them and the dogs wanted nothing to do with them.  To enforce the point, I held one near each dog's face and growled deeply to let them know that I was protecting these chicks.  They turned their heads and wouldn't make eye contact with the chicks.  Mission accomplished.

Hen poking her head into the hen house

Soon after opening the top back up, one of the hens climbed the ramp and poked her head in.  When she saw the chicks, she retreated to the ground.  After a minute or two, she climbed back up and went into one of the nest boxes.

Two hens in the nest boxes

Within minutes, another hen joined her.

After one of the two emerged, she was pretty vocal about the whole thing.  That's about as noisy as the hens ever get.  The chicks still haven't ventured out of the top of the hen house.  The hens, in the short time they spent travelling to the nest boxes, ignored the chicks entirely.

Eggs

The hens rewarded me with three eggs by the end of the day.  No more Easter egg hunt!

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