Its Chicken Time!

Now here is a post that has been too long delayed Brain.  A post about my FABULOUS CHICKENS.  After all the build up and the pics of the chicken coop in progress, I have posted almost nothing about the experience of actually keeping chickens.

Last September I drove out about an hour north west of Austin to buy some chickens from a lady who advertised having them for sale on Craig's List.  The coop was ready and I was EXTREMELY excited to finally be getting chickens to put in it.  The zoning laws around here say that one may keep up to five chickens (no roosters) so long as they are 50' from any human dwelling.  I had decided to get three chickens to start with and add a couple more after I made sure I was doing everything correctly for the first three.  So I went to pick up my experimental chickens with my best friend in tow and no real idea what I was getting into or what I wanted other than I wanted three egg-laying type chickens.

Arriving at the chicken ranch (no other word for it, it was acres of chickens) I was a bit overwhelmed.  I tried to describe what I envisioned to the kindly lady who owned the chickens.  " I want chickens for eggs, " I said at first, my eyes wandering around the hundreds of available birds.  "Pretty chickens, egg layers, but good pets too."  The woman paused in the act of leading me to one of the enclosures, I think she could tell there was going to be more.  "Umm," I continued, " they need to be heat and cold resistant, and I'd like to have more than one color of egg, in fact, I'd rather not have white eggs if possible and... oh my, what kind of chicken is that?  I like that one."  Gently the woman steered me away from the birds I was admiring.   "Those are roosters," she said patiently. "Oh yes," I said, abashed, "no roosters, we can't have roosters where I live."

"I think these will be perfect for you, " she said, leading me into an enormous, well-cared-for pen full of small, young hens of various colors.  " These wont lay for another month or two but most of them are Easter Eggers, they're reliable layers, fairly tough in the elements, they tame down pretty well and they lay green to blue eggs.  The others are Bared Plymouth Rocks and Orpingtons, both types are good layers, and make nice pets."  There was no question of selecting individual birds from the masses, small chickens are fast, so I crossed my fingers, hoped for good (if slow) chickens, and let the lady scoop them up, looked them over and present them to me for my approval.   The three chickens and a 50 lb bag of feed cost me right around $50.  Seemed like a good deal to me.

So I wound up with one of each type of chicken.  That lady gave me a box to bring they home in.  In my excitement I had forgotten to bring along anything in which to carry them.  On the way home we stopped and picked up a bale of hay, a feeder and a waterer.

The Girls.  Jones, Dawn Henly and Jayne

My chickens settled into their new home right away.  They went upstairs and happily used their new perch each night.  After we added some no-slip tape to the ramp, they were able to come down stairs in the mornings with dignity instead of the original slippy-slide method on the slick ramp (an exodus that made it seem as if the upstairs part of the coop was coughing out little feather ball explosions each A.M.).  Everything went pretty smoothly except for my discovery that chickens are LOUD!  Even sans rooster, a chicken coop is a noisy place to be.  I (and probably my poor neighbors) can clearly hear my chickens any time they decide to cackle about something, which they do regularly.

A bit of trial and error got me on track with the best feed stores in the area and the type of feed my chickens prefer (crumbles and scratch, NOT pellets).  I enjoyed introducing them to new treats, which they fell upon like miny velociraptors.  Bananas and kale are favorites but nothing can compare to the feeding frenzy that happens when I bring out the meal worms.  Meal worms are like chicken crack.

I waited and waited for my chickens to start laying eggs.  I took it as a good sign when they stopped peeping like baby chicks and upgraded to a full, adult chicken cackle, but well into December and still, we had no eggs.  I wondered if the lack of eggs was due to it being winter.  Some chickens stop laying when the days grow short.  Or maybe I had defective hens?  Eventually I grew impatient enough to set them out in their tractor (an triangle shaped enclosure that B. built that is covered on three sides with chicken wire and leaves the bottom open so the hens can scratch in the yard safe from hawks and cats) next to the bar-b-que grill while B was cooking chicken.  "This is what happens to chickens who don't lay eggs," I told The Girls darkly.

Finally the message sunk in, and this past Feb.  I went out one morning and discovered our first egg.  A perfect brown egg, neatly placed in one of the three nesting boxes.  I was like a kid on Christmas.  I texted everyone.  "We have an egg!" I reported, and sent pictures.  I probably no one was that interested, but I figured since I have never had kids, this was my chance to be a proud Mom.

All went well after that except that I caught something from those chickens.  I caught Chicken Fever.  Yes, the dread chicken fever where one becomes obsessed with chickens.  Three chickens will not do.  I was reading chicken blogs, posting on my chicken group message board, pinning chicken pictures to Pinterest, and dreaming of MORE CHICKENS.  I'm in trouble, because as far as i know Chicken Fever is incurable.