“Ladies, stand back while I assess the situation!”

“I said stand back Annoying White Chicken or you will feel the wrath of Evil!”

“You’re not the boss of me Evil. Hey LADY, where are my tasty corn bits??”

“Don’t listen to her! All of you may kiss my toes now and bow to my super amazing rooster awesomeness!!”

“Hey LADY, throw me some corn bits. My lovely lady hens are uprising and my toes need kissed!”

I should note a couple of nice things about the breed before I start complaining:

• They are pretty.
• They are excellent at foraging.
• They are very alert and unlikely to be eaten by predators.

As chicks the Lakenvelders were extremely dominate over the other breeds and would beat them up. The male Lakenvelders reached chicken puberty about a month early and it was all downhill from there. We soon had to separate all the non-Lakenvelder chickens from the piranhas (as we came to call them).

The Lakenvelder rooster violence was partly our fault. We kept holding off butchering because the roosters were so tiny and it was our first time butchering chickens by ourselves. If we were to do it again we would have culled the tiny roosters and just composted them. It would have been better management on our part, I think, and we wouldn’t have had so many shredded hens.

One of the most annoying Lakenvelder rooster traits was their crowing. They NEVER stopped. Listening to continuous crowing all day was literally making Lee and I irrationally angry. We were originally going to keep at least one rooster but decided against it for the sake of our sanity.

The Lakenvelder breed is very flighty. This is a good trait for a foraging breed, granted, but an annoying trait when you walk into their pen everyday and they are trying to kill themselves getting away from you. The hens are very good at flying so we have about four that roost high up in the trees at night

The hens lay tiny, and I do mean tiny eggs. I knew they would lay smaller eggs when I got them, but I was not expecting the actual scale (or rather lack there of). Even worse, with the short winter days the hens have completely stopped laying. Every other breed we’ve tried has still laid all winter without supplemental light. By comparison, our original 2 1/2 year old hens (who need to be retired) are still laying at about half their usual rate.

So here Lee and I are stuck with 7 Lakenvelder hens and we don’t know what to do with them. They are too small to be worth the trouble to butcher, they aren’t laying eggs, and I don’t think I could even catch them to sell them. I don’t suppose that anyone reading this blog is desperate for some backyard Lakenvelder hens after reading this indictment of the breed?

Lee and I feel like every new chicken breed we ordered this year has been a failure for various reasons. As mistakes go, it hasn’t been that expensive. At least you gain experience from your failures. We’ll think twice before ordering another “good forager” in the future. I’m not sure the high cost in frustration is worth the potentially small savings in food.

I feel bad that our two Polish hens both seemed to die without much reason. I like trying new breeds and I honestly picked out the Polish breed because they were cute and they fit my smaller chicken criteria. I didn’t stop to think that they might not be the best breed to go with our super aggressive free ranging Lakenvelders. Sometimes I could just kick myself.

We retrofitted the barrel that we had set up for our pig waterer last year, and poof, we had a chicken waterer fit for a king.

The picture below is an overview of the structures in the chicken pen. The reconfigurable chicken house in the middle is set up as a roosting house now. I think we need to lower the roost bar a little bit, as not all the chickens are too keen on using it at the moment. The reconfigurable range shelter to the left only has food and nesting boxes in it now. The nesting boxes at this moment are cardboard ones as some of the hens have started laying (willy-nilly around the pen) and Lee hasn’t got a chance to build real ones yet. (Actually, in this picture I had just put the nesting boxes in the shelter. Almost every chicken crammed themselves into the shelter to watch a hen use a box.)

I’ve been bringing scratch corn to their pen every day to train them into coming to me. Like most chickens, they are all corn addicts. It’s especially useful training for the Lakenvelder hens. If they fly out of the pen, we’ll have to lead them back with corn because they are too fast to catch.

The original reconfigurable house (the “mini-coop”) had a solid floor, fully enclosed walls with removable screen doors, and was designed as a multipurpose structure: chick brooding, deep-litter roosting house for layers, or (with the center panel removed) as goose housing.

This new reconfigurable house (the “range shelter”) is designed to hold the feed, water, and nesting boxes. If needed, it could also act as a feeding station for sheep. The range shelter was built to the same dimensions as the mini-coop, but features a bolted-together frame of posts and beams. The back panel is plywood, as are small sections on the ends and front to provide shear strength. In keeping with it’s “reconfigurable” design, there are a total of six separate C.R.A.P. rails on the structure: two at each end on the inside, two at each end on the outside, and two in the middle.

The range shelter was cheaper, lighter, and faster to build than the mini-coop. It has a metal roof just like the mini-coop, but to keep things simple it’s not removable. Temporarily, we attached scrap boards to the ends and some scrap fencing to the front so we could lock the “victim” chickens in it until they got used to their new view. We also added a small section of roosts so they could practice roosting. The roosts are held up by mounts that hang from the C.R.A.P. rails.

I’m writing this post about 6 weeks after the events described (it’s been busy around here lately). The “victims” chickens spent a few days locked in the range shelter, and then we opened it up and let them free range. The pen to the right of the range shelter in the next picture housed new victims of the Lakenvelders. We eventually had to squeeze all 7 female Lakenvelders in there, leaving the 8 violent males locked in the mini-coop. The Lakenvelder females have since been integrated into the “victims” flock and are also free ranging.

After all the turmoil, the original “victims” were the first to free range, so it didn’t turn out that bad for them. Despite their weeks and weeks in captivity due to our poor planning and busy summer, they quickly adapted to running through the tall grass, eating bugs and seeds.

I picked several new breeds to raise this year. Since we use our hens for eggs only, I thought a smaller chicken would cost less in upkeep. I was also looking for a good forager. I decided to give the Lakenvelder breed a shot. Let me say that we dislike this breed with a passion! The roosters are noisy and never shut up. EVER! One afternoon, we counted 51 crows in a one hour period. If a few joggers had gone by, that number could easily have doubled. We thought getting rid of the noisy rooster would give us some peace. Nope. They picked a new loudmouth, and he was at 110% volume within a day.

The Lakenvelder’s are prone to hysteria at the drop of a hat it seems. Everything tends to set them off in frantic mosh-pit terror. One of the hens tore her head open in a freak out moment. How? I don’t know, but it was accomplished. She is presently doing fine in a reCooperation hut.

The Lakenvelder’s are also tiny. That is part of the reason why we put off butchering the boys because they look as big as pigeons. The original loud mouth, who is no more, only weighed in as a 2 pound broiler. I can only imagine the petite little eggs the hens are going to lay. I knew this breed was smaller when I was picking them out, but I don’t think I realized how that translated into real life. They are dwarfed by all the other chickens.

Despite their small size, the Lakenvelders are extremely aggressive with other breeds and each other. Our victims unit in the garden was built as a recovery coop for chicks that were bloodied by living with the Lakenvelders. The “victims” have been moved into a new coop in the main chicken pen and are happily free ranging in the tall weeds.

Beak Head is the free chick the hatchery threw in. He is the top rooster and doesn’t let anyone forget it.

One of the Araucana males we got seems to be just dumb and mean. This one isn’t going to stay around.

In contrast, one of the female Araucanas seems to be quite smart.

The one Cochin that I got (because the breed is described as “docile, friendly, and with good brooding characteristics”) is a brute. She is top hen and is somewhat aggressive.

The one Polish hen that survived (who has been named Punker) seems sweet. I think Punker is ridiculously cute and I want a flock of them secretly. Lee says that farm animals should be practical, not cute.

Some of the other chickens really don’t like Punker (or she is a rooster’s favorite) and she has been in and out of the reCooperation hut. Most recently, all her tail feathers got ripped out and chickens were standing around drinking her blood that dripped out. She is going to have to stay in confinement until her feathers heal back and most the roosters we aren’t keeping are culled.

I like the feather colors on this male Araucana, but he isn’t going to stay around. He had leg issues for quite a while and is mean to the hens.

We are probably going to keep this Araucana male we named Evil. He seems to be the most alert of the males with his warnings. He calmed down once he wooed over a lady friend from Beak Head.

So, that’s the state of the chicken saga. We’ve got a mini coop of Lakenvelder roosters still stuck by our back porch and crowing from 7am to 9pm. The Lakenvelder females are in a reCooperation hut until we can integrate them with the free-ranging “victims”. Punker is in her own crate until her tail feathers heal. And in the main pen, we’ve got free ranging Aruacanas which divide their time between fleeing from too many roosters and lounging about in pastoral bliss.

I tried to research crooked chicken toes, but most of the information I found addresses this problem in chicks. Chicks can develop crooked toes from riboflavin deficiency, bad brooder management, and poor genetics. I have no idea what causes the problem in a 4 month old hen. Despite her crooked feet, the hen seems to run around just fine.

Our future egg laying flock just become 42% less cute.

We got a previously cracked empty egg and filled it full of hot sauce and put it in their pen. Sure enough, all three chickens had to take a taste.

There was some extreme chicken distress going on in the box-o-shame. Lee and I deduced that somebody really needed to lay an egg and was trying to hold out until they could get to their nesting box. We decided to let them back out, since we could uniquely identify all three chickens if we needed to butcher them later. All three chickens made a mad dash to the nesting boxes and in about twenty minutes all three had laid an egg.

We kept putting hot sauce in any broken eggs we found and our unbroken egg collection rate went up dramatically. I think partly this happened because I spent the day working in the garden. I would stop and get an egg every time the “HELLO WORLD! I LAID AN EGG” crowing started.

This is not a success story yet. We are still getting broken eggs. Lee said he saw one chicken eating an egg despite the hot sauce on top of it. Apparently chickens can’t taste the capsaicin in spicey food. For that reason, we got a bottle of hot wasabi mustard and will try that next.

In other chickens news, we have a chick house full of piranhas.

At night when the chicks would be relaxing under the heat light, I started noticing plucked bare backs. Oh joy of joys! We knew it was cramped in the mini-coop but I was hoping we would get the coop moved and have them free-ranging before anything like this happened. Lee has ordered wheels online, but until they arrive and he builds the mini-coop moving rig we needed an alternate solution. A midnight operation of “Save The Naked Chicken Butts” commenced and the box-o-shame was converted into the box-o-victims.

The box-o-victims turned out to be every chick that wasn’t a Lakenvelder. I think we must have racist chickens. Well I take that back, the Lakenvelders have allowed one Araucana to remain with them un-plucked. Every morning I expect to find that last chick plucked bare by the piranhas. Surprising facts about Lakenvelders: they are the smallest breed we ordered, they are the most dominant, and they were the first to start crowing. The mini-coop is parked just outside our back door, and with all the pubescent crowing it sounds like someone is throwing a party with kazoos.

The king of the box-o-victims is happy. We call him Beak Head. The other chicks weren’t happy with him as they are pretty peaceful and Beak Head really wanted to prove how awesome he was by stomping on them. I say ‘was’ because Beak Head has hurt his leg and is no longer pulling king of the box moves.

Poof Head is ridiculously cute but is a little overwhelmed by life. She never knows what is going on because she can’t see a thing. When the other chickens run from us in terror, she runs toward us. Her male pattern baldness (courtesy of the Lakenvelders) is starting to grow back in. Poor thing. The second little Poof Head seems to be much more with it. Maybe that’s because her head feathers haven’t blocked off her eyesight yet.

So far I have been liking our new Araucana strain, the Cochin, and the Polish (even though they are ridiculous). The Lakenvelders have been my least favorite. We will see how they are when they get older. They are supposed to be great at foraging. It’s no big loss though (as we can just eat them), and sometimes you just have to experiment to find the breeds that work best for you.