Lee now feels like a bad chicken owner. We again have no idea what happened. There is no way any animal could have gotten into the chicken coop and killed it. There were no marks on the chicken anyway. And why was the waterer empty when I just filled it the night before? Did I not screw the lid on right? We are scratching our heads over those two questions. So we are now down to 9 chickens. ARGG! I really, REALLY, hope nothing happens to any more of them.

As Lee was burying the dead hen in our field we noticed a white dog sleeping out further in the pasture. Lee said that he saw a streak of white dog earlier that day when he was out. So now it appears we have acquired a stray dog. I can’t get close to it and have no idea what to do with it. If I see it around tomorrow then I will bring some food out to the field. I don’t want the dog to have a Jack snack because it is hungry.

It’s been raining every day almost since we planted our tomatoes last week. We are hoping they don’t get some kind of mildew disease from this weather, because I don’t want to have to replace them all. I can’t believe that it is almost June and there’s is still a list of things we just can’t plant. The ground is too wet and the weather too cold. What has been growing in this weather is the slugs! Those slugs have been munching on my basil and other seedlings and I am not amused. With so much moisture around the D.E. doesn’t work especially fast. So I am considering what to use as a slug control. Lee is suggesting trying out a beer trap.

Sigh.

I have never seen any evidence that our hens have eaten their eggs before. The nesting boxes are always clean looking. Now a few weeks ago I found an egg on the floor of the coop, but I just thought it was due to one of the favorite nesting boxes being in use. We have four nesting boxes for our eleven hens and quite routinely I will find 6 eggs in one nesting box. It’s a very special nesting box that is quite beloved by our hens. Don’t ask me why. Two of the nesting boxes are favorites while the other two lesser loved ones go empty quite often.

I had been scanning the floor of the hen house since I found that first egg but I had never found another one. So I chalked it up to a “bird brained” fluke. As much as I love my hens, I am well aware that there is a reason for that expression.

Hopefully we can break the cycle now. If not, there is going to be some chicken dinner in our future. I am going to put a few golf balls in the coop so any future egg pecking will result in sore beaks (okay not really) and no yummy egg stuff rendered. We are going to put an oyster shell feeding station in so if they are lacking any calcium they can get it that way. Finally, I am going to start collecting eggs more than once a day. Otherwise we seem to be doing everything already that articles suggest in how to break the egg eating cycle.

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

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.

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 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.

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!

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!

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 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.