YUCK! I’m scratching my head over here trying to figure out what is happening in the hen house. Sunday was a nice warm day here for us and as I was in the middle of mucking out the coop I took a pause and looked at it’s walls. There were little (tiny) crawly bugs everywhere on the walls and ceiling. They were evenly spaced except for a few places where they were more clumped up together.

I got worried we had mites so off Lee and I went to get some food grade diatomaceous earth. The only store where we could find it only carried 50 pound bags, so I am well stocked on that now. I went nuts with it dusting down the coop. Then I got two of the girls and checked around their vent areas and other places as well as I could. I still didn’t find any of these bugs or eggs on them. Later that night, when I went to go lock the hens in for the night, I looked around the walls again. Most of the bugs had disappeared. I don’t know whether this was because it was colder by then or if it was because of the diatomaceous earth.

Today when I went out to do another dusting of diatomaceous earth in the coop I still saw them but not nearly as many. It was also a colder day so I don’t know if that affected the bugs any. So what I am wondering is if I have a mite problem or a spider problem. I can’t seem to find anything that tells me you can find mites during the day time in plain sight on walls and such. The hens are laying just as fine as always. In fact I have more eggs per day then last year. They don’t seem to be adverse to getting into their coop. Those would all be signs of mite infestations. Now they do have some peck marks to their combs but I am attributing that to their 5 days of being stuck in the coop.

Here are two links that talk more about mites in poultry.

• http://ipm.ncsu.edu/AG369/notes/poultry_mites.html
• http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/pdf/8162.pdf

Since the chickens started living in their coop back in May 2009, we have never cleaned it out. Now, this wasn’t because we were lazy, but because Lee wanted to try out the deep litter approach. I must admit that I had some reservations about it. I was afraid that is was going to stink and be really gross, but that was never the case. The chicken coop rarely smelled. Whenever it did get a little bit smelly, I would just add a new layer of wood shavings on the top of the litter layer and fluff everything up. Fluffing is accomplished either with a pitchfork or by throwing a few handfuls of crack corn across the floor and letting the chickens go nuts. That would take care of any smell instantly.

Besides the time savings, deep litter is reported to help control coccidiosis, reduces aggression, and supports chicken health by producing vitamin B12. Deep litter is best used in conjunction with open-air housing so excess ammonia is ventilated. The concept is very similar to operating a compost pile. You can find a complete guide to the whys and wherefores here. We didn’t use any lime in our management of the litter, because although it would help the texture it must be manually mixed to avoid hurting the chicken’s feet.

Since the girls got moved out to the garden I decided that I was going to clean out the coop so I could use their litter to make compost for the garden later. It was also getting quite built up in the coop which made it difficult to close the door.

I left a little bit of the old litter in the coop so all the microbes would start the new batch of litter cooking.

Then I added a whole bag of new pine wood shavings to the floor.

During the past 9 months of using the deep litter approach I probably should have lofted the litter more regularly then what I did, but it still seemed to work out fine. Another problem that we had in the coop was that the litter would get a little too wet from our waterer. We have a hanging waterer that, once it gets low, tilts and spills water onto the shavings below it. Sometime soon we are going to try to solve this problem.

After the chicken coop move had been completed I took a peek inside to look at my girls. The first thing I see is this big blood smear on the chicken feeder and my eyes about pop out of my head.

So I go into the coop to find out what happened and expecting to see someone with a very bloody head. All I could find was a Bob that looked like it had a peck to the comb. A lot of the Rhode Island Reds and the Barred Rocks has what looked like small peck scabs on their combs. I’m thinking that they REALLY are not happy with the recent confinement in the coop. Today would have been their fifth day in the coop. I can understand why big chicken places clip the beaks of their chickens if only five days brings out this sort of pecking. The only other thing that I can guess with what happened was maybe the chicken got hurt somehow in the latest move.

Since so many of them seemed to have little pecks to their combs, due to what must be boredom, there was no way I could separate that many. Saturday they will be let out to forage finally and that will hopefully solve that. Today to help with the problem I put new bedding in, fluffed up their deep litter to make scratching easy, and sprinkled in about a quart of cracked corn on the floor to keep them busy. I will keep a close eye on them for the next week to make sure the problem doesn’t get worse.

I did a late night chicken snatching from the coop. Elwood has a very poopy butt that I wanted to take a closer look at. She won’t let me near her in daylight hence the late night snatching. I kept hoping that the poop would just fall off. Unfortunately, it never did and seemed to be getting a little worse. Sometimes the other chickens will get a little bit of a poopy butt but then it seems to go away. I always attributed that to food related items. Like when they got lots of pumpkins and squash to eat all at once.

I washed off most of Elwood’s clumpy poop problems with warm water and then trimmed the feathers in that area with scissors. I did some looking around online and found that poopy butt problems can be either caused by lice, mites, or your chicken can just be prone to a poop butt.

I found a link that shows a chicken with lice (scroll down the link for the disturbing chicken butt pictures) but I didn’t think that Elwoods problem looked quite like that. Another picture of lice and mites that I found didn’t remind me of Elwood’s problem either. The chicken in first link has the lice clumps right tight to her butt feathers. After working on getting the poop clumps out with water the smaller ones that were left on Elwood were not tight to the base of her feathers.

So, do I have a lice problem or not I’m pondering. I guess that I will keep an eye on Elwood and all the other chickens. I’m hopeful that Elwood is maybe just predisposed to getting a clumpy butt and doesn’t have lice. Make that really, REALLY hopeful.

I took a picture of her in the egg laying box earlier today. She even let me pet her. Probably because she was so freaked out wondering why the nesting box got so bright.

We’ve been using a chicken feeder we made from scrap parts ever since the chickens were two months old. Lately it’s been driving Robin a little crazy. Our eleven laying hens eat about 100 lbs of feed a month, which translates into refilling their small and awkward feeder every 3 days. After 7 months, it was time to build something better.

Having reviewed various suggestions online, I was struck by the simplicity of the feed hopper design at the top right of chapter 5 of Handy Farm Devices. Make a box. Install a lip to serve the feed and an angled panel to hold the feed. Add a hinged panel to fill. Simple! Of course, nothing I embark on is quite that simple, but I liked the concept. My version is this:

As you can see, I made a number of improvements to the basic design. The lid is angled at 45° to prevent hens from standing on it. The bottom is angled at 15° to encourage the last of the feed to slide to the front. The front panel is two separate pieces arranged to increase the capacity. The sides are 2×6 material, and everything else is made from scrap 1/2″ panel material (either plywood painted on one side or OSB with the sealed surface facing the feed).

Everything was assembled with screws. Since the box is 27.5″ wide, I added a small block at the middle of the tray to hold the three bottom panels tightly together. (In the event that we switch back to serving mash feed.) As I was working on this feeder, I came upon a rather interesting idea. Instead of screwing it to the coop wall, I would attach an angled rail to the back which could hang from a matching angled rail installed in the coop. A small spacer block at the bottom of the feeder would keep things plumb against the wall. We could then build several feeders of varying widths, and mix and match them to the feed. Lots of free range food? Add a narrow 8″ feeder with free-choice oyster shell to boost their calcium intake. Home grown corn or grain? Install two 16″ hoppers, one with a commercial mix (so the chickens can balance their dietary intake) and one with the grain. Any future feeders I build to this design will use a single angled front panel to simplify construction.

We invaded the chicken coop at 11pm to take some measurements and return with a rail to be screwed into the wall. (Robin didn’t want to wait another day after it was finished.) With the feeder hung, we poured in a full 50 lb bag of feed and there was still room for another 30 lbs or so. So, not only will this new feeder reduce the frequency of refills by at least 7x, but refills are now simply a matter of cutting open a bag of feed and dumping the whole thing into the feeder. Much simpler!

Jake has never laid an egg. Jake and Elwood are our two Araucana hens. Elwood only started laying November 5th, which was a month and a half late compared to all our other hens. As the months went on Lee started calling Jake, “Jake ala king” because he said he was going to butcher her in the spring. Might as well eat her instead of feeding her fat little butt. My mom laughed and said, “No, wait a little longer. Some chickens are just late egg layers.” She also said, “You know some chickens never do lay and are just duds.” So Lee really was set on “Jake ala king”.

Remember, we got our chicks April 29th so in just three months we will have had them a full year. Well guess what?! “Worthless Jake”, “Jake ala King”, “That Dumb Chicken”, finally laid an egg. You can tell Lee isn’t really thrilled with Jake. Even though Lee thinks Elwood is dumb as a box of rocks, her crazy appearance makes Lee giggle so he’s okay with having her in the flock. Poor Jake had nothing going for her, until now.

It’s pretty cool having a few colored eggs in the mix, but having them lay so much later is not very practical from a money sense. I also wish our Araucanas were friendlier and not so skittish. They really are our least favorite chickens for these reasons. I would like to try out one of the chocolate colored egg laying hens later on. Maybe they will lay sooner and be friendlier for us. I’m am happy though. All of our hens are finally on line!

I must say that when I decided to follow Robert Plamondon’s advice on open-air chicken housing, it was with some reservations. The health benefits to the birds for the improved ventilation are quite obvious, but it seems the health detriments to them in cold weather are equally so. Well, it seems I have no cause for concern. Last night the temperature dropped to 12° and our birds were fine in the morning. Robin shot this picture of the little chicken mafia in the afternoon, still below freezing.

When I let them out this morning, there were 4 well-chilled eggs waiting for me, and 11 very thirsty birds. We don’t have a water heater, so the ritual each morning is to thaw out the chicken waterer and refill it. Then they all do their best at emptying the thing. I will be very glad when the weather gets warmer around here. Winter in Oregon is not supposed to be frost-bite inducing.

The chickens have stripped their pen into a bare lot. Obviously, thats not very good for it. Since we haven’t gotten the rest of our property fenced yet I can’t let them out into the pastures. Even if I wanted to I wouldn’t because we have a lot of neighbors that don’t keep their dogs contained. I have no desire to start loosing chickens to the dogs just so I can free range the hens a little better. I have noticed that they have started eating more of their food again since there isn’t as much to eat on in the pen.

The only other place that has a complete fence around it at the moment is our vegetable garden. I only have garlic in there right now. So I have been carrying a few chickens over on the non-rainy days to let them have a go at all the yummy greenery. They aren’t too sure about it and spend most of their time hanging out by the fence line. Today I had a Bob escape from the garden and walk her way back to the chicken pen. I guess she didn’t like the fresh greenery (or change). We are thinking about moving the chicken coop over to the garden for awhile. That would give their pen a chance to spring back. Lee told me that some skids are planned for the bottom of the coop soon.

Lynn here is a picture of Elwood and Jake for you. It will be neat to see what colors you wind up with. Elwood is the one that has a muff around his face. Jake never grew one. They are the two far right chickens.

Here is a picture of Elwood that I got a while ago. It’s the only one I have that I managed to get a good full on of his muff.

…or maybe it was Jake. They are only a month and a half late compared to our other hens. I was starting to think there was something really wrong with them. The color of the egg is a pale blue green. Feeding them for another month and a half without them laying cost an additional 2 dollars each. Before, when we worked out the cost for raising our hens until they laid eggs, we just averaged the price for them all. In actuality Elwood and Jake cost about two dollars more than all the other chicks. So if you take those two figures into account, it cost us $20 to raise Elwood and Jake to egg laying age. I guess you just have to pay more for the special colored groovy eggs. If you were a professional egg farmer and Araucanas really do start laying later, it wouldn’t be worth it for your money.

Can you spot the big one? It’s been a month now and the girls are still having varying egg sizes. Most of the eggs have worked their way up to a medium small size. I just had a new girl start laying today and it was such a tiny petite egg compared to the others. There are three girls that still haven’t started laying. No colored eggs yet so I am pretty sure Elwood and Jake are in those two late ones. Today I was graced with the jumbo egg you see in the picture. It didn’t want to fit in the egg carton. I feel sorry for the hen that layed it.