Backyard chickens Part 2
Reality check time! Although the idea of your own hens sounds fun(and it is) there are some challenges to keeping a backyard flock. I want to share these with you so if you decide to take the leap and get your own city hens, you will be better prepared than we were nine years ago.
1) I think the biggest challenge we faced when starting with chickens was realizing that there is no place to take them when they’re sick. The expression we learned was “a hurt chicken is a fine chicken, a sick chicken is a dead chicken”. As in, chickens are pretty tough when it comes to recovering from scrapes and even broken bones, but illness of any kind is a different story. For better or worse, individual chickens are rarely seen by vets and no one in our area had any experience with them. They were Googling alongside us when we took our favorite ailing hen in to be seen. The vets were sympathetic, but not much help. We turned to our friends who kept chickens and found them to be the experts. They had acquired hands on knowledge from years of keeping poultry and were generous with sharing their home remedies. After our first bout with a sick chicken, we decided we had better learn more than the basics. We now own several books on poultry health and Isla Rose is the resident expert chicken doctor.
2) Unless you never leave home, you will need to find a chicken sitter. We have had a few wonderful friends care for our birds over the years. Without them, we could not take a vacation as a family. There is no chicken kennel. They need twice a day care, letting them out in the morning and closing them up at night, as well as food and water. Add collecting eggs regularly to the list. If you like to pick up and go often, chickens are not for you. They don’t take up as much space as a dairy cow, but they are similar in the time and attention required. These are not low commitment animals.
3) Eggs are a seasonal product, despite what the grocery shelves says. Chickens need approximately 14 hours of daylight each day in order to lay. Here at this latitude, that means we have eggs in abundance from mid April until the beginning of September. How do you get eggs when the days shorten? Electric lights in the coop. This is an added cost to consider if you want to have eggs year round. However, this is not infallible. Hens go through a molt each year where they lose lots of feathers and grow new ones. It typically takes a month and occurs in the fall as the days shorten. During this time all their energy goes to growing feathers and not producing eggs. Lighting the coop won’t make them lay during this period. There are long periods every year where our hens don’t lay eggs but require care nonetheless. If you are mostly excited about having your own eggs, winter will be hard on your expectations.
4) Even though most cities with backyard hen bylaws don’t allow roosters, you may still be woken up at the crack of dawn by your hens. Remember, they are light activated. When the sun starts rising at 04:30 in the summer, so do chickens. Although they are quiet most of the time, chickens do squawk loudly when they lay an egg, when they are threatened or when they are broody (sitting on the nest, wanting to hatch chicks). One time our chickens were squawking up a storm and when we went to see what the problem was, we found them standing around a garter snake in the yard. They seemed to be saying “get rid of this interloper!” To keep them from waking us early, we black out all the windows in the coop in the summer. As far as the egg laying celebratory squawk, there’s not much you can do except give your neighbours eggs occasionally. Really though, they are less noisy than a barking dog, it’s just a sound we aren’t used to hearing in the city. Luckily we have very nice neighbours. :)
5) Chickens can lay waste to your vegetable or flower garden with their need to scratch. I have raised beds in my backyard which we protect with chicken wire so we can let the hens roam and eat bugs. Without this protection, they would most certainly rip out my flowers. They also love to eat the fruit off my shrubs. Have you ever seen a chicken do a vertical jump? I have! My sour cherries and red currants are a favorite of my hens and once the low hanging fruit is eaten, they start leaping into the air to get the higher ones. We let them eat what they can reach because they do such a good job keeping the pest population down.
6) The term “pecking order” exists for a reason and it can be brutal to watch if you’re not prepared for it. Introducing a new bird into an existing flock is tricky as is reintroducing a bird that has been isolated due to injury or illness. Chickens are capable of pecking each other to death. We have had a young hen killed by the others when we introduced her into the coop too quickly. She suffered and we felt terrible guilt for not protecting her. It was particularly hard on Isla Rose, who cared for the little hen for a few days before she succumbed to her injuries. Not good for an animal lover with a soft heart.
7) Although predators are a frequent concern of cities when they consider allowing backyard hens, we have never had a problem. We live near the edge of the city where we can hear foxes and coyotes in the nearby farmer’s fields. We’ve seen weasels and skunks in our yard, occasionally the neighbour’s cat as well. In nine years, we’ve never lost a chicken to a predator. Have we lost a chicken? Yes, a few times. You heard the one about the chicken who crossed the road? Well, sometimes chickens are too curious for their own good. We’ve noticed over the years that the chickens who tend to disappear are the ones who are the escape artists, always getting into spots in our yard where they’re not supposed to. Even though we clip one wing on each chicken to keep them from flying over our fence, a few chickens have managed to get out into the wild. We assume they didn’t last long once out in the woods but we’ll never know. Maybe they are living the good life in the forest with a family of grouse.
We love our chickens but they are not like owning a cat or dog. The time commitment and amount of knowledge you need to properly care for a backyard flock is considerable. I haven’t even touched on building a coop, illness prevention or dealing with chicken manure. I just want everyone who is thinking of getting chickens to go in with eyes wide open and benefit from our experience.