Thinking About Getting Chickens?
7 Thinks You NEED to Know BEFORE Starting Your Flock
Chickens are the opposite of smart.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the little fluffy things more than most other animals. But they are very set in their ways, and their ways aren’t always great. They are intelligent on a certain level, and you can train some of them to do specific things, but for the most part, they are the dullest crayons in the box of farm animals. Besides sheep. Sheep are just plain stupid.
If you can remember to treat them like curious toddlers who can’t help themselves, you’re on the right track.
1. Protection
Chickens are at the bottom of the food chain. Everything tries to eat or kill them. It’s your responsibility to give them a safe, predator-proof place to sleep every night. A short list of predators includes coyotes, racoons, opossums, owls, hawks, eagles, bobcats, mink, and my personal favorite predator to hate: stray dogs. Dogs are the worst predator for backyard chickens, because they will destroy fencing and pens to get to your chickens, only to kill them and run off before you can do anything about it.
Your chickens need a pen, even if you decide to let them free-range in your yard. They need a safe place to go at night or when you aren’t around to keep an eye on them. Chicken wire will NOT work! Chicken wire contains chickens. Chicken wire does not stop predators. Dogs, racoons, and most of the other predators listed above can easily tear right through chicken wire. You’ll need hardware cloth (the wire used to make most rabbit cages). You can get away with a chain-link dog kennel, but know that mink, snakes, weasels, and other small predators can still get through and kill your birds.
2. A Safe Place to Sleep
Chickens will find a place to sleep, but it’ll be on top of things you don’t want them to poop on. Like your porch railing, the hood of your car, a tree, etc. They have an instinct to roost as high as they can go to stay away from most predators at night. Once they find a high spot they like, they’ll keep going back, even in rainy or freezing weather. This is why you need a safe place for them to roost.
Chickens have terrific eyesight, but they cannot see in the dark at all. This is why they easily get picked off by owls and other nighttime predators.
The best place for chickens at night is inside a secure house. Chickens aren’t picky. They don’t care if you spend $1000 or use scraps from your previous projects. They need a place off of the ground so they feel like they are roosting naturally. They need a secure door so racoons can’t open it. They need ventilation because they are very dirty, dusty animals. The air inside an enclosed chicken coop can get dirty very quickly. Good ventilation allows them to breath clean air, preventing respiratory illnesses.
Their coop also needs to be draft-free in the winter. Chickens are very cold-weather tolerant. Much more than we humans are! Their body heat is trapped beneath their feathers, keeping them very warm. But they do need to be dry and out of the wind. With that being said, they need even more circulation in the summer when it’s stifling hot. More chickens die from overheating in the summer than they do from freezing in the winter. Open windows are great, as long as they don’t let rain in and are completely covered in hardware cloth to prevent predators from entering.
3. Food
Food is a big deal, especially if you have chickens because you want lots of fresh eggs. Yes, it’s true chickens could survive in the wild with just foraging and free ranging (if they could stay away from predators), but when you take them from that wide open world of food to being confined in a pen or even in a backyard, they need you to feed them. And by food, I absolutely do NOT mean chicken scratch. You can go to a feed store and buy a bag of scratch. Your chickens will gobble it up like kids at a candy dish. But that’s exactly what it is to your chickens – candy.
Scratch and corn are both like candy for your chickens. If you want them to be healthy and produce healthy eggs, you’ll need to feed them a layer feed every day. Most feed stores offer a layer pellet and a layer crumble. The crumble is great for small bantam size chickens, and for making messes. It seems to dissolve on the ground much faster than pellets. Either one you choose will deliver the nutrients your hens need to be healthy, happy, and lay plenty of eggs.
You can also supply grit to your chickens. Grit is basically tiny rocks that the chicken keeps in her gizzard and they help to crush up food. You can add some grit to a dish for your chickens to access, but don’t mix it into their feed. They know when they need to add a little grit to their diet and will take it as-needed. If your chickens are allowed to free range, they may not need grit since they’ll find the tiny rocks in the soil.
Oyster shells are a popular choice to add to chicken feed. The purpose of feeding oyster shells to your hens is to give them a boost of calcium for strong egg shells. This isn’t a necessity, but can help your hens if their shells seem a little too fragile.
4. Eggs
You hens are going to lay eggs starting between six to eight months after they hatch, depending on what breed they are. They will lay eggs even if they’ve never seen a rooster. If you have hens and no rooster, the eggs they lay will be infertile and will never hatch into chicks. If you have a rooster with your hens, you could possibly hatch some of the eggs to get more chicks. Even if you don’t, the eggs will taste the exact same. Chicks don’t start forming in the eggs until the hen has built up a good pile of eggs. Once she has the number she likes, she’ll start sitting on them to keep them warm and only get up once or twice a day. She’ll sit on those eggs for about 21 days, which is how long it’ll take for chicks to develop and hatch. If you don’t want any chicks, just collect the eggs every day or so.
If you want to know more about storing and using fresh eggs, read this.
5. Nesting Area
Along with a cozy place to sleep, your hens need a place to lay their eggs. Most nesting boxes are inside the coop with outside access to make it easy to collect. If you have a coop you can walk into, you won’t need outside access. Chickens are picky – you can have a nice setup with enough nesting boxes for each hen, but they’ll all fight over one nest. It may not even be the same nest each day. A milk crate, a 5-gallon bucket on its side, a purchased nesting box, or one built out of scrap lumber will do. Fill it with clean pine shavings and they’ll figure out the rest.
Hens like privacy when laying. They like a nice, fluffy, partially private place to concentrate and lay their egg each day. There are also a few who end up laying their eggs in your dog’s food bowl, behind the feed barrel, beneath your car in the driveway, or somewhere you’d never think to look. If you do free-range and you notice an absence in the number of eggs you get daily, you may need to look around. Once a hen finds an out-of-the way place to lay, the rest of the gang is likely to add to her pile.
6. Health
Chickens are pretty hardy creatures, and they are hands-off for the most part. But there are some things every chicken tender should know before getting a flock of their own. For starters, chickens are prey animals. This means they know they are low on the food chain so they don’t want to draw any unwanted attention to themselves when sick or injured. In the wild, the sick or injured animals get picked off very quickly. It’s instinct for your chickens to hide illness from you until it’s too late. If you know what to look for, you can catch things before they get too bad.
Chickens get lice and mites. They get them from wild birds, so there’s not much you can do to stop it. These poultry parasites don’t want to live in humans, so you’re safe even while handling your chickens. But they can get to be too much for your chickens, cause her to become anemic and die. Once a month, grab a few of your hens and check for bugs. These bugs are tiny, but you can see them if you part the hen’s feathers and look at their skin. The bugs like to hang out in the fluffy area below your hen’s vent (butt) and on her back. They live close to the skin and on the shafts of the feathers. If you see any, treat the entire flock immediately. All feed stores have poultry dust and/or spray. Treat them once, and then again in 10 days to make sure they are gone.
Any chicken that is acting strange – standing off from the others, lethargic, puffed up and sad looking – is not feeling well. Separate her from the others and watch her behavior. Keep a dog crate for a chicken hospital. Line the bottom with puppy pads for easy cleaning. You can move this inside a spare room, in the garage, or on the porch to keep an eye on an ill chicken.
I have a list of chicken illnesses and treatments here.
7. Social Order
Chickens are flock animals. This means you will need more than one or two. Many don’t realize it, but chickens are social creatures, just like your pet cat or dog. They need to interact with one another to be healthy. When kept together, they will form bonds with one another. They will even show grief if one dies or leaves the flock. You’ll need to get at least 3-4 chickens to have a healthy, happy flock.
Pecking order is a real thing as well. Your chickens will bicker on occasion, but they will usually settle it once the order is determined. If you introduce a new chicken to your already established flock, you’ll need to do it slowly. The main flock may attack the new girl just because she’s new. Let them share a fence or place the new chicken in a dog crate inside the pen with your flock so they can get used to each other. It’s best to add new chickens at night, while they are all on the roost in the coop. They will spend the night listening to each other and by morning, things should go smoothly.
Chicks
If you’re thinking about getting chicks instead of pullets or adult chickens, there’s an even steeper learning curve. You’ll need more supplies and will do more cleaning than you’d like. Chickens are messy. Chicks are worse.
Fluffy chicks are cute, but with that cute fluff comes temperature control. Full-grown feathers are what keeps chickens warm. That cuddly fluff won’t trap the body heat, so they need artificial heat until they have full feathers. Chicks need to have access to 99-degree heat in the first week. After the first week, that temperature drops a few degrees at a time. The best way to keep them warm is a heat plate for chicks. Heat lamps work, but they are huge fire hazard. They also get extremely hot and, in some cases, too hot for the chicks. A heat plate works like a mother hen: the chicks duck to get beneath the plate and the plate keeps them warm while they are beneath it. Heat plates can be raised as the chicks grow taller.
Chicks need a starter crumble feed, not a layer pellet. They also need access to water at all times, but not deep water. They don’t know any better and can easily drown themselves.
Chicks can’t be put into the coop or run with adult chickens until they are mostly full-grown. Chickens are rude creatures and will pick on and outright attack any newcomers. Small chicks will get pecked to death or even eaten by adult chickens if they are mixed together too soon.
Another downside to starting with chicks is you may end up with more roosters than you’d like. If you can find them, purchase sexed chicks. Some breeds can be sexed at hatch so you’ll know immediately if they are male or female.
If you’re thinking about getting chickens and have any questions at all, ask me! Or if you have chickens and are having any trouble, send me an email or a message on social media. I love to help solve chicken problems.
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