I spend a lot of time reading up on homesteading topics over the winter, and this year I fell in love with buckwheat in the abstract.  But as I experiment with the crop in real life, the scales are falling from my eyes.  In our vegetable garden, buckwheat failed as a cover crop in our dense clay soil, and I'm not all that impressed with its progress in the grain half of the chicken pasture either.

I opted not to irrigate in the forest pasture despite a moderately dry summer since I want to eventually grow trouble-free crops that can be planted and then forgotten about.  The buckwheat doesn't enjoy this decision --- every afternoon the plants wilt and look very sad.  They bounce back overnight, but the chicken pasture buckwheat's growth is slower than that of the later-planted buckwheat in the irrigated garden, even though the chicken pasture soil is a well-drained loam enriched with copious chicken manure.

Unfortunately, our old field corn seed didn't even come up, so our droopy buckwheat and some beans are the only plants currently growing in the grain paddock.  In retrospect, I wish I'd planted the whole area with oilseed sunflowers --- next year!

After less than a month in the larger forest pasture paddock, our cockerels have scratched the place up drastically.  I'm actually a bit shocked, and am revising my opinion of their foraging abilities.  It took our flock (larger then) two months to reach this stage in the much smaller paddock.  What's going on?

I've got a few hypotheses, as always.  Maybe Dark Cornish really come into their own as they reach sexual maturity.  Or could it be they watched the Mama hen and her chick foraging and followed suit?  Or maybe the vastly increased foraging is an optical illusion, brought on by the recent lack of rain, which has slowed down the weed growth and made it easier for the chickens to devastate their pasture.

While I was in the pasture conducting my photo shoot, I also stumbled across this chicken, who looks quite different from the others.  Could she be a pullet rather than a cockerel?  She seems to have nearly no comb and her speckled feathers are quite distinct from her brothers'.  Suddenly I'm caught on the horns of a dilemma.  Should I save a hen and rooster to keep the breed going and give them another try next year, perhaps using the Mama hen as a foraging trainer?  Or stick to my guns and eat the lot?  Decisions, decisions!

Our chicken forest pasture is still very much in the experimental stages, but one part has been a whole-hearted success already.  I've been dumping garden debris in a lazy compost pile in the pasture, and the chickens immediately come and pick through the plants (adding a bit of nitrogen to speed up the decomposition process at the same time.)

By keeping an eye on their excitement levels, I've discovered what our chickens do and don't like.  Our lazy cockerels turn up their noses at run-of-the-mill weeds, but are quick to gulp down clover leaves.  When I tossed in several big wheelbarrow loads of gone-to-seed snow peas (after picking out the best seeds for next year, of course), the chickens scratched at the pile for hours.

Of course, chickens like protein, so their love of legumes is no surprise.  What did shock me was their favorite garden food of all --- broccoli leaves!  As I tossed broccoli leaves over the fence, our chickens tore them into little bits and gulped the green stuff down as fast as I could throw it in.  In fact, when given the choice between cabbage worms and broccoli leaves, the chickens unanimously chose the latter.  What do you think broccoli leaves have in them that makes the greens so tasty?

With the first paddock of our chickens' forest pasture as bare as it was going to get, we turned the flock into the larger paddock and started preparing for the winter.  Mark and I pulled out the few living plants still visible, then hoed and shoveled out the worst of the roots.  Finally, we planted the bare area in field corn, beans, and buckwheat, with red clover seeds scattered in the pathways.

Although I'd like to wean our chickens off grain as much as possible, homegrown grain still feels a lot more sustainable than storebought feed.  I haven't decided yet whether we'll harvest the grain in the fall for winter feeding, then turn the chickens into the paddock to clean up missed kernels, or whether we'll just let the chickens graze the ripe grain, gorging until they're done.  I'm pretty sure chickens won't overeat in the latter situation, but I'm not sure if the grain would spoil as it sits out in the weather for a few weeks.  Like every other aspect of this experiment, I plan to play it by ear.

With Dark Cornish no longer in the running for a permaculture broiler breed, I'm starting to narrow down our choices for next year's experiment.  Freedom Rangers were near the top of my list, until I did a bit more research.

What are Freedom Rangers?
The term "Freedom Ranger" is merely an American popularization of the hybrid breed developed for use by French companies operating under the Label Rouge program.  Label Rouge is a certification process, a bit like "free range" or "organic" in the U.S.  Their website is difficult to read if you don't understand French, but ATTRA put out a PDF file about Label Rouge which is worth a viewing (and from which I stole this image.)

Freedom Ranger parents come from a few proprietary lines owned by European corporations.  So, don't think you can buy a flock of Freedom Rangers and raise your own, or even start your own breeding flock by growing the two parent breeds.  Freedom Rangers, like Cornish Crosses, are industrial hybrids.

What are their advantages?
Freedom Rangers are relatively fast growing, but they don't grow as quickly as the Cornish Cross.  As a result, they don't tend to have the high mortality rates that break so many backyard broiler-raisers' hearts.  Freedom Rangers are reputed to grow to 5 pounds in 12 weeks, to be tastier than Cornish Crosses, but to have less breast and larger legs.

Based on one backyard experiment, Freedom Rangers seem to have a feed to meat conversion ratio that's almost as good as Cornish Crosses --- 3.4.

What are their disadvantages?
As I mentioned earlier, we couldn't create our own self-perpetuating Freedom Ranger flock, which is a deal breaker for me.  Having to buy chicks every year makes the meat pricey --- the experiment I linked to above ended up with a cost of $1.73 per pound for Freedom Rangers and $1.47 per pound for Cornish Crosses.

I'm also not sold on Freedom Rangers being good foragers.  If they're so good at catching bugs, why did they eat so much grain?  I think I'll let someone else do that experiment for us and move on to a different breed for our next batch of broilers.

We decided to try out Dark Cornish cockerels for our first broiler experiment since they are supposed to be good foragers and very predator resistant.  It turned out that predator resistance wasn't really necessary in our instance, and our cockerels seemed to be lackadaisical foragers.  The meat will be a bit better for us than storebought since the chickens did consume some greenery and insects, but we clearly spent more than we would have on grocery store meat, or on raising Cornish Crosses.

Here are the stats on the 12 week old birds, which averaged a mere 2.25 pounds dressed weight apiece:

Big producers focus on the feed to meat conversion ratio, which in our case was about 6:1.  This is double the average for Cornish Cross broilers, meaning that our chickens actually consumed twice as much grain as a similarly sized Cornish Cross would have.  That's the precise opposite of the goal of our forest pasture experiment, so we'll be moving on to a different breed next year.

Meanwhile, we still have two thirds of the cockerels bulking up for another month or two.  I'll let you know if their figures are any different, and how the 12 week old birds compare in taste to older birds.  Stay tuned!

Several people warned us that a five foot high fence around our forest pasture would not be sufficient to keep the chickens inside.  Other people worried that aerial predators would swoop down and pick off our birds.  It turns out that neither problem materialized, but we did end up having a fencing issue --- Lucy.

We've been throwing all of our food scraps into the forest pasture, and food scraps are our dog Lucy's primary failing.  Try as we might, we can't seem to teach her that food of any sort is off limits.  She wanders through the garden picking strawberries, peas, raspberries, and tomatoes, and if we don't put the trash safely in the barn we'll find a ripped open bag strewn across the yard.  So we shouldn't have been surprised that no amount of training was able to get across the message that food scraps in the chicken pasture were off limits.  A few hours after I tossed the scraps in, I'd come back and see that Lucy had broken a hole in the chicken wire and eaten up the scraps, letting the flock out in the process.

Mark solved this problem with a Zareba K9 electric fence charger.  The device was absolutely perfect for our needs, with a low voltage so I don't feel so bad about zapping our beloved pet, and with no need for a grounding rod.  Mark hooked up the charger on a wire about six inches off the ground around the perimeter of the pasture, I threw in some scraps, and we waited to see what happened.  When Lucy's nose hit the wire, she jumped backwards so fast it seemed to break the laws of physics.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect Lucy might have been zapped again later on a second part of the fence, because now she keeps at least eight feet of distance between herself and the chicken pasture at all times.  The weeds have grown up to touch the wire and we haven't bothered to cut them back because I'm pretty sure the problem has been solved for good.

Gene Logsdon, author of Small-Scale Grain Raising, posted on his blog last week about a farmer who sold a large crop of grain and used the same money to buy a much smaller amount of processed chicken feed.  Logsdon wrote:

Since this concept is right up my alley, I asked him for more information.  He explained that his current flock of 12 laying hens and a rooster "range over about an acre of woodland and a bit of pasture and some lawn."  He supplements their diet with about four ears of whole corn or a quart of wheat every day, increasing the amount a bit in the winter and providing oyster shell at all times.  Since we feed our chickens about a cup apiece of processed feed per day, he's cutting back his feed by two thirds with his forest pasture.

On the other hand, Logsdon does feed his meat birds commercial feed to "get them fattened in a hurry and out of here."  This bit of data makes me think that my current forest pasture experiment is a bit too ambitious for phase 1.  I think our next incarnation will involve our layers on pasture, and our broilers in tractors on commerical feed.

For those keeping track of good foraging chicken varieties at home, Logsdon and a commenter suggested these breeds --- Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orphingtons, Golden Comets, Australorp, Speckled Sessex, and bantams in general.

People seem to have such an easy time turning their chicken run into a moonscape, but it's been a struggle around here.  We started our chickens out on an 800 square foot pasture full of weeds, planning to have the birds denude the ground so that I could plant some grains while moving the flock to another paddock.  Over a month later, the pasture was still quite green, so we chopped off two-thirds of the area and let the chickens continue to graze on the small portion remaining.

Three more weeks passed, in which our cockerels did a little work on the pasture, but mostly entertained themselves eating up the wheelbarrow loads of garden weeds I tossed into their enclosure nearly daily.  So Mark and I took some time to root out the perennials with a shovel --- goldenrod, deertongue (a native grass), young trees, and poison ivy all bit the dust.  Finally, the ground is beginning to look bare.

I want the chickens to continue to eat up any new sprouts for another week or so, then we'll rotate them into the other two-thirds of their original pasture.  The mother hen and her chick have been having so much fun in there that they barely eat any storebought feed.

A week and a half after our newest chick hatched, I'm starting to see the tremendous advantage of letting a broody hen do all the work.  After just a couple of days in the nest, our hen decided it was time to start foraging lessons.  She and the chick hopped down to the ground and went to work --- Mama Hen scratched up a worm and looked excited, broke it into pieces, and did everything she could to get that worm into her offspring's mouth.  She even broke the chick feed into tiny pieces to expedite our chick's early meals.

The mother hen also taught me that chicks can be active from week one.  Although the chick begged for a warm-up session under the hen's belly every few minutes at first, by now it's trotting around the chicken pasture without a care in the world.  Granted, the chick does stay close to its mother's side, and I don't worry about it straying despite the fact that it can easily slip through the chicken wire and out of the pasture.  (Speaking of which, if you don't read our homestead blog, you might like to read the tale of how we moved the chick onto pasture --- it was quite an adventure!)

Tuesday evening, I went to check on the chick and noticed its mother perched up on the roost for the first time since the hatching.  Where was the little chick?  Surely it wasn't old enough to spend the night alone?  I walked closer, and a wee head poked out between the feathers on the hen's underbelly.  Somehow the mother got her chick two feet off the ground before it was two weeks old!  This chick is so precocious compared to our brooder-raised chicks, there's no comparison.

I'm afraid our chicken pasture contest is a bit of a wash.  As the weeds grow taller and taller and our pudgy chickens become slower and slower, it's becoming clear that there will be no scratching the earth bare at this rate.  Our Dark Cornish chickens don't seem to be as avid foragers as I'd hoped they'd be, although they do like picking through the huge mound of weeds I keep wheelbarrowing into their pasture.

What you all probably care about the most is --- who wins?!  I've decided to name Bethany our grand prize winner since she picked the furthest away date which is closest to infinity.  Bethany, drop me an email with your address and your onions and flowers will be in the mail next week.

The more scientific among you may be asking --- what now?  I still want to have the chickens scratch up some of the earth to expedite grain planting, so we're going to subdivide their current pasture in hopes that a smaller enclosure will actually get scratched bare.  Given the proximity of butchering day, we may wait to build more pastures until next year, and will be rethinking our broiler experiment --- maybe we'd be better off having the slow, fat broilers in tractors and our perky layers achieving self sufficiency on pasture?  Stay tuned for future experimentation!

If we were raising Cornish Crosses, our eight week old cockerels would be just about ready for slaughter.  Instead, our Dark Cornish broilers are starting to get heavy (and we even heard one crow!) but are still at least a month away from butchering.

Actually, I'm not quite sure when we should plan to eat them --- some folks seem to butcher their Dark Cornish cockerels at 12 weeks for a small bird, while others keep them growing until 20 weeks.  Unless someone chimes in with their own experiences, we'll probably slaughter our birds in three stages to see how weight and taste varies between 12 week, 16 week, and 20 week old birds.

So far, we've spent about $2 per chick on feed and the same again on buying the chicks, proving everyone right that it's not really cost effective to raise slow breed chickens as broilers compared to buying commercial meat at the grocery store.  Large scale production of organic Cornish crosses ranges from $5 to $6 per bird raised to slaughter age --- ours aren't quite organic since we didn't pony up the extra money for organic feed, but I figure the bugs they eat makes them about as healthy for us as commerical organic chickens.  I'll let you know the final cost per bird, weight, and taste test results when the time comes.

Of course, our costs would go way down if we managed to get a breeding pair and raise our own chicks in later years.  We still can't tell if any females slipped in amid the males, but if our broilers are as tasty as they look, we'll work toward having a self-sustaining flock.

We're running a chicken pasture contest over on our homestead blog.  When will the first forest pasture be completely denuded of vegetation and ready to plant in buckwheat and clover?  Leave a comment over there with your guess and you may win two of our favorite perennials --- bee balm and Egyptian onions.

To read the details, click the link at the top of the page.  I hope you'll all enter!

As you know, I'm on a quest to find out cheaper ways to keep our chickens fed.  Robert Plamondon provides unlimited access to whole corn kernels, and finds that the cheap corn cuts down on chicken feed costs.  While corn isn't a well-rounded diet for chickens, feeding corn can definitely cut costs if your chickens have access to plenty of range.  They should get enough protein in their diets by catching bugs and scratching up worms, with the corn acting as a carbohydrate boost.

Plamondon notes:

Sounds like I should plant a bit of field corn along with buckwheat in the grain portion of our forest pasture.

Our forest pasture experiment has finally begun!  Mark finished up the first pasture on Friday and let out our cockerels to poke around.  We plan to let them eat this pasture down to bare earth, then rotate them into a pasture on the hillside.  Once the chickens have moved on, we'll sow a combination of clover and buckwheat in the first pasture to prepare the ground for a do-nothing grain rotation.  When the buckwheat is ripe in the fall, we'll rotate the broilers back into the grain pasture to fatten them up for slaughter.

Although they're not built yet, we plan to have two additional pastures on the hillside.  We'll rotate the chickens between these two pastures at intervals, making sure that they never stay in one paddock long enough to kill all the plants.  We're not quite sure how big these two pastures will have to be, yet --- hopefully, we'll figure that out over the next few weeks as we see how long it takes the cockerels to scratch up their first pasture.

Rotation will be pretty simple since the coop is at the junction of the three pastures and has a door opening into each one.  At night, we can close the chickens in the coop, then open up whichever door we please to let them into a new pasture the next morning.

Meanwhile, we're putting in some perennials so that the pasture will provide even more chicken feed in the years to come.  An Illinois everbearing mulberry is supposed to provide all of the food a flock of chickens needs for two or three months in the summer; ours should start bearing in a couple of years.  We also planted two Nanking cherries and an unidentified bush cherry to provide more summer fruit.

We'll continue to feed our chickens while they're on pasture until I work the kinks out of our plan --- I certainly don't want them to be malnourished.  But hopefully the access to greenery and bugs will start cutting back on our feed costs.

We turned off the chicks' light when they reached a month old.  With our insulated brooder box, we probably could have taken away their heat earlier, but the weather turned chilly and we had to go out of town for a few days, so we waited.

By then, most of the chicks were fully feathered except for parts of their heads.  Dark Cornish chickens are known for their appressed body feathers that give the birds a less fluffy look than ordinary chickens, and I think they look a bit like little vultures.

I'm used to keeping chickens in tractors, so I was shocked by how quickly the cockerels scratched the floor of their coop down to nothing.  Then the area started to stink.  Good thing Mark was ready with the first pasture area!

When we opened the door of the coop to let our cockerels out for the first time, the chicks weren't quite sure what to think.  What was this big world?  Was it safe?

There was a lot of scurrying in and out for a few minutes, and I remembered why "chicken" is a synonym for "coward."

But before we knew it, they were dustbathing, sunning, pecking, and scratching.  Chicken bliss!

In our quest for good foraging chicken breeds, I started to wonder --- is foraging ability in chickens learned or is it innate?  The answer seems to be a little bit of both.

Pecking is an innate chicken behavior.  In one study, scientists placed a window in a developing chicken egg so that they could study the chick's behavior in the shell.  The chicks pecked even before they hatched, clearly proving that pecking is ingrained in their genetics.

While pecking is innate, foraging is learned.  You can see chickens learning to forage when you give day old chicks their first food dish.  It may take a few minutes for the chickens to discover the food, but when one bird finds it, all of the rest soon follow.  So I continue to think that it's important to get our broilers out on pasture ASAP so that they can learn more foraging behavior.

Even if you don't plan to raise your chickens in a forest pasture, it's useful to understand the root of pecking behavior.  Chickens in wild conditions spent up to 90% of their time foraging, which equated to 15,000 pecks per day.  When placed in a confined space with high quality food that is consumed in a matter of minutes, though, chickens often misplace their foraging behavior into pecking at each other.  The result --- called feather pecking --- can be bloody and disturbing.

We've discovered that our automatic chicken waterer solves this problem since it gives chickens something to peck at other than their neighbors.  We also like to scatter our feed on the ground to give our chickens more foraging time, and to raise them in chicken tractors where plenty of plants and bugs are present for supplemental food.  Giving your chickens a more positive outlet for their pecking behavior seems to work well at preventing feather pecking in even a confined flock.

I've been asking everyone I meet about how much food chickens can get from pasture in preparation for my forest pasture experiment. At this rate, it's going to take me centuries to compile any useful data. So I've put together a poll that's quick and easy to answer, and which will hopefully compile that data for me.

Here's where you come in! A poll is only useful if dozens of people submit their data. Please take a minute to fill in your answers, then email a few of your chicken buddies to get them to input their own data. Hopefully we'll be able to come up with enough information to expedite our forest pasture experiment so that we can all start spending less on chicken feed. Without further ado, the poll:

How many chickens have you raised on pasture with little or no input of feed during the summer?

How much supplementary feed did you provide per bird per day during the summer?

How many chickens have you raised on pasture with little or no input of feed during the winter?

How much supplementary feed did you provide per bird per day during the winter?

What is your pasture area like?

Thank you for your time!

Three weeks ago, we ordered 15 Dark Cornish chicks from Natures Hatchery, to be shipped the next week.  Then waited, and waited, and waited.  I called the post office --- any chicks?  "Nope," our nice postmistress said.  "Have you tried calling the hatchery?"

So I called the hatchery, got voice mail, left a message.  Waited a few more days.  Still nothing.  So I emailed the hatchery.  Nothing.  Called the hatchery again.  Nothing.  By now, it had been two and a half weeks since I ordered our chicks, and a week and a half since they were supposed to ship.  I finally gave up, left the hatchery a message canceling my order, and looked elsewhere.

Unfortunately, everyone else was ordering their chicks while I sat around trusting Natures Hatchery to come through.  My new choices were to order all male Dark Cornish to be shipped soon, or wait over a month to get some females.  We chose the former route so that our forest pasture experiment can start rolling along, and will order some hens to round out our flock in the summer if the breed seems to fit the bill.  (Or maybe we'll get lucky and there'll be some mis-sexed birds in our first flock.)

Just thought I'd let you know why we haven't posted any chick pictures yet --- and to warn you off Natures Hatchery.  By the time you read this, our new chicks should be in the mail!  Our brooder and chicken waterers are ready for them.

This year, we're going to experiment with raising broilers on a forest pasture.  The method we've conceived is a lot like the way farmers used to raise chickens around here, letting them have free run of the woods to collect most of their food.  The traditional Appalachian farm family probably kept few or no chickens alive over the winter when food was scarce, but they also fed their chickens little or nothing during the growing season when bugs and fruits were abundant.

I haven't been able to find much information about forest pastures for chickens, so we're making most of it up as we go along.  A google search to find the carrying capacity of an acre churns up widely varying results, but conventional wisdom seems to come down to this:

• Traditional "free range" farmers put about 80 to 100 chickens on an acre.  At this level, your pasture won't be eaten down to bare earth, but your chickens won't get much sustenance from the land either.  Various sources estimate that chickens on this type of pasture may get between 5 and 20% of their food from the pasture.
• Less scientifically backed sources suggest that about 10 chickens can get all of their food from an acre of land.  This is more like what we're considering, but I think the websites we found are far too vague to be counted on.  After all, winter is the down time --- could ten chickens survive on an acre in the winter?  If so, could we raise three or four times that many on an acre in the summer, slaughtering most of them so that only a few breeding birds have to forage there during the cold weather?  Are there crops we can plant in parts of the pasture to give the chickens more nutrition?  Does that number consider rotating chickens through multiple paddocks to give the overgrazed regions time to recover?  Perhaps most importantly, how will we know if our chickens aren't getting enough forage in a forest pasture and need some supplemental feeding?
  

We're thrilled to be trying to answer those questions this year.  Maybe by this time next year, we will have licked the chicken pasture probem just like Mark licked the dirty chicken water problem.

Although we considered trying to domesticate the hen and rooster we saved during that snowy winter, my first foray into chicken keeping came almost a decade later.  I was living on the farm owned by Mark's aunt and uncle.  The old log barn halfway down the driveway had a chicken coop attached, and when I showed an interest in livestock, I was quickly given a dozen or so hens and a rooster to put in the coop --- a mixture of Buff Orpingtons and Australorps.

The coop was large and airy, and had a large run attached, but before we knew it the ground was scratched down to bare earth.  This is the way the majority of Americans raise their chickens, and at the time I didn't know any better.  The eggs were still better than storebought, but the hens didn't lay much in the winter and the yolks were nowhere near as yellow as those we get from our hens today.

Here I am emptying out their poopy chicken waterer.  Mark hadn't arrived on the scene yet, so I spent a lot of time pounding frozen waterers against the ground to knock the ice out and lugging buckets of water down the hill.  Now, of course, we'd install one of our automatic chicken waterers and at least clean up that portion of the coop.

Mark's aunt grew up with chickens, raised in the traditional farm style.  She told me that her family always cut a fresh red cedar to put in the coop each year.  They believed that the cedar kept lice and other bugs away.

Although we lived on a farm for the first eight years of my life, I was introduced to chickens after we moved into town.  Our city block was home to a seemingly wild band of roving poultry that roosted in the trees, nested in brushy thickets, and scrounged for their food.  I asked my mother what she remembered about our wild chickens and her tale gives some insight into how chickens live in the wild.

So far, the easiest to find photo of "our" wild chicks is one taken in '97 of Maggie [Anna's sister] with a flock of little chicks, feeding them out of her hands on the front porch. But we arrived 10 years earlier, in '87, and I could swear those chicks were there when we got there! I wonder if you remember how they would rush across the street, usually from some big trees on our side across and down to the big maple and hemlocks, where they also got fed, by the old lady who lived alone in a house that has now been torn down.

At that time, Reggie M. [a neighbor] lived near us, before his house burned, probably in '89 or so. Around that time, at least by '90, Errol [Anna's father] had set out rhubarb and asparagus over at the edge of the side yard property where Reggie's house used to be.  And this is where the wild chickens would scratch around, where they had nests, and even where the chicks hatched!

What kind were they? I think they were connected to the game fowl that ran wild in a cemetery a few miles away. While we still had the side yard, they were pretty balanced, that is, about as many hens as roosters. Yes, the roosters did crow every morning! And, yes, there were at least three different flocks of little chicks rushing around, with one batch in our backyard sometimes having a problem of falling in the pond out back! Somehow there were fewer cars on the street then, and the young guys who sped by usually tried to slow down, especially if they were going down to visit Reggie, who also fed the chickens scraps of his breakfasts.

Do you remember a pelting rain--or even hail--one June, that drove one flock to shelter under a rhubarb plant? I hope you remember eating their eggs! I think you also remember the stray dog we saved, who had survived on eggs and beer from tossed beer cans.

I know you remember when you brought a frozen rooster and hen that had dropped out of one of the trees, up here to a box in the Playhouse, with a hot-water bottle and a heating lamp to revive them! And these two were about the only survivors of that killing late-spring storm, probably in '97. Or so we thought. The little chicks Maggie is feeding on the porch had some scrawny rooster uncles, and by the next year the balance between hens and roosters was all off. Suddenly there seemed to be only one or two hens, and too many roosters by far--and drivers now tried to even the balance. In fact, with all the roosters, the mating, and the crowing, Jackson [another neighbor] stepped in.

By that time the sheltering rhubarb and asparagus had been forcibly relocated to the back yard, where George also was tied. Now the big old honeysuckle bush I've still kept was the roosting spot for the strongest roosters, and there seemed to be no little chicks able to hatch.

I knew they were in trouble, but thought Nature would take its course, even though I realized, with the end of "our" side yard our whole neighborhood was becoming more suburban, more gentrified.

There were just too many crowing roosters for Jackson, who hired a man and his son to catch them and take them away. At first I tried to protest, for after all, they were coming in my yard to get them! But the fact was, I had never really adopted them to care for them. So when I had to be away, with George, too, they all were caught except two. Even these last two finally were caught, at dusk one day, but not before the wildest rooster had flown to crow his last from the top of our house! But he had to roost somewhere, and it was back to the bush, and caught in the dark, for him.

This week I'll be sharing other stories of chicken flocks I have known.  If you've got a chicken story you'd like to share, be sure to comment!  Otherwise, check out our homemade chicken waterer, great in coops and tractors.