Mild Chicken Worry

I’ve started to get a little anxious that if our chickens crossed the road, they’d have to take the short bus to get there.

It’s been a month or so since I’ve posted anything new on the blog.  Not a lot has been going on between Jay and I both taking turns being sick and it being hot as Hades outside.  The girls will be 6 months old on 7/31, so we should get eggs soon after that, I hope.  Jay finished off the nesting boxes for them, and I put in the wooden ‘inspiration’ eggs for them.  And now we wait.

 While we’re waiting, my worries grow a little each day.  Why, when after 3 months of putting themselves in the hen-house at night, do Sylvia and Pearl want to camp out on the ladder outside (that’s not big enough for all of them) instead of going in their house?  Phyllis is left conflicted about this, because she wants to go in the hen-house at night on her own, but doesn’t want to stay there by herself, so she does laps from the ladder to the hen-house and back again.   I know they’re ‘just chickens.’  But the spot they’ve chosen to sleep on at night now is not weather-safe.

Pearl on the Ladder

There is nothing to protect them from getting drenched in our coming-down-sideways rains if I leave them out on the ladder.  And I don’t want them to get sick and not know what to do with them or even know they are sick until it’s too late.  Not to mention that they have to take turns actually sleeping because the ladder is wide enough for exactly 2 and one half chickens to roost.  Someone has to stand up if the other two are settled in.  So out we go, at dusk every night, with a container of bulgur wheat to coax them up in the hen-house.  Or worse, have to relocate them and chase them around squawking and getting all overheated (them, not us.) Once we shut the door (which we didn’t used to do once they started going in there on their own a few months ago) they get all pissy and upset and fret over the door being closed.  I can just picture them dragging tin cups along the wire, chanting, “Let us out, you filthy Screws!!”  Prisoner: Cell Block H: The Poultry Yard.  Then, to save time in the morning, we have to go back outside before we go to bed to open the door back up so they can get out on their own by themselves and not wait for one of us to get up.

Then there is the food situation.  I have this 4 page list of things I got off of Backyard Chickens that people (and their poultry) deem as good and proper chicken treats.  Ours won’t eat any of it.  Ours like bulgur wheat and Swiss chard.  They ate cucumber guts once.  Never again.  All these tried-and-true yummy things, including watermelon, cabbage, and darn-near anything leftover that other people’s chickens eat, ours won’t touch.  If I bring them something they are not familiar with, or have decided they don’t like, they pace around it in a circle, muttering a slow suspicious, ‘buck buck buck BUUUUUUUUck’ and eye it sideways.  Always slow, always 4 'bucks' with the last one drawn out and wary.

Phyllis being Suspicious

Phyllis will always come up to check it out, but if she won’t eat it, the other two won’t even try.  Strawberries? Nope. Tomatoes? Nope. Even things they liked a month ago like Spanish nettle weeds and their own food they all of a sudden don’t want to eat.  On top of that, they’re big girls now, so we switched them to layer feed instead of growing feed.  Not so much.  They don’t like that, either.  If they were picky toddlers, they’d be living off chicken nuggets and fries.  The irony is not lost on me.  Their version of that is scratch grains and black oil sunflower seeds.

Sylvia

Next comes the heat.  It’s, like I said, hotter than Hades here.  And humid.  They are panting most of the time.  So I go off to look up what other people do on Backyard Chickens and try some of the suggestions.  1. Pan of cool water for them to step into because if their feet are cool, their whole bodies will cool off.  Nope.  Water pans elicit the same suspicious sideways-glancing, ‘buck buck buck BUUUUUUUck’ as undesirable food does.  And apparently it's VERY SCARY to accidentally step into it while running after a bug, knocking the pan over and spraying water everywhere.  Frozen plastic jugs of ice set in a big Rubbermaid bin tipped over on its side.  Like a walk-in AC chamber.   Nope.  Spritzing them off with water.  Boy howdy were they offended by that!  People in dry hot climates use those mister-fan things, but in Florida that doesn’t actually cool anything off. It just makes it more humid and sticky and harder to breathe.  We’re discussing finding a way to put a fan out there, that at least might get the air moving a little and cool things off.   At 2:00 every afternoon I go out and unroll a roll-up shade to give them some relief from the afternoon sun and put out a few frozen water jugs over in the coolest part of the coop.  I don’t know if they realize it or not that they can sit closer to them and cool off a bit, but I feel like I’m at least trying to give them some relief. 

I had no idea there was this much crap to worry about with chickens.  I thought they’d be little low-maintenance garbage disposals that had a happy edible by-product for us.  Everyone else seems to have chickens like that.  Tammy’s chickens are 2 or 3 weeks younger than ours and are already laying eggs!  We’ve got eccentric high-maintenance, low-achieving short-bus chickens that seem to defy all the chicken conventional wisdom. I feel like there is something I’m missing… something that I’m not doing right, or enough of, for them to succeed.  I don’t want my chickens to get an Attendance Award.  I want them to Graduate with Honors!  Hell, at this rate I’d settle for a happy productive C-student chickens.

Where is The Chicken Whisperer when you need him?