Today when I went out to watch the chicks I picked up Twisted Beak to look at her closer. Her beak had gotten worse. We looked it up online and it seems a twisted beak (also called a scissor beak condition) doesn’t get better. It is recommended to cull the bird right away. If you keep a bird with a twisted beak you have to trim and file it’s beak and feed it smaller food in a deep container. The bird won’t be as big and sometimes other chickens will start to pick on it because it looks different.

The new ramp allows us to keep the human-sized door closed, which discourages wild birds from using the chicken feeder. The chickens adapted to the new door rather quickly, and it’s funny to watch them run up and down the ramp. I wanted a picture of the chickens milling about, but of course they all decided to keep their distance least I try something funny–like take their picture.

Evil says, “HEY, stop looking at my butt.”

Next, I sprayed down the coop with a livestock bug spray. This wasn’t something that I was keen on, but since I was moving a new flock into the coop I wanted to cover all my bases and give them a healthy start. Ever since we had a bug outbreak in that coop I’ve been a little paranoid. We also have wild birds (which can spread bugs) that will fly in the coop to eat food out of the chicken feeder. I waited a few days after spraying before we moved the flock into the coop.

They have been loving their new pen with all the tasty greenery. The Lakenvelder breed cracks me up because I will see all 7 of them zoom back and forth like little road runners from one end of the pen to the other. All the other hens look like lumbering fatties trying to keep up with them. The whole flock also frequently runs up to the fence line by the road because they think the neighbors are going to feed them corn. I don’t think their hopes are every fulfilled.

Thanks for the good times and all the eggs ladies.

“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.