A while ago, I wrote a blog about our first experience raising chickens!  We got seven chickens to start with, of several different breeds (Australorpe, Orpington, Wyandotte, Amerucauna), built a chicken coop from scratch and started collecting eggs!  Our chickens are now 2 years old, so we’ve been at it long enough to learn a few things!

Here’s the top 8 things I’ve learned as a first time chicken owner:

1. Plan to lose a few.  Chicks are pretty fragile little critters, so don’t be surprised that they don’t all survive.  We lost two right out of the gate.  We still have no idea what was wrong with them.  We separated them from the rest of the chicks, just in case.  They just stopped eating or walking, got weak and died, despite my best efforts to nurse them back to health.  I cried briefly when the first one died. (She was cute – ok?!  Don’t judge me.) The second I was sad for a few minutes, but accepted it was nature.  The third one died after we moved the chickens outside. She just couldn’t hack it and got picked on a lot by the others.  I didn’t think she was going to make it.  In fact, she died when we went on vacation and our house sitter freaked out, thinking it was her fault. (It wasn’t!)  I told her to throw it in the trash can and not worry about it, so I guess you get used to losing chickens!!

2.  Build your coop BEFORE you bring home your chicks.  We decided to build our coop from scratch because of our many predators here.  We have seen or seen tracks of hawks, eagles, foxes, coyotes, mountain lions, black bears and lots of dogs within a mile of our house.  We made our coop extra beefy with 4x4s and 2x4s.  We also wanted to insulate our coop really well, because it frequently hits -20º here in the winter, so we used 1″ foam insulation in the build and made foam plugs for the vents to keep the snow out.  Of course, it takes a while to build all of this, but our chicks outgrew their brooder before we were done. We moved them into the coop in the garage while we were finishing construction on the roof and the run.  We luckily had an overhang off our back barn that we converted into the chicken run.  We lined it with hardware cloth and dug in cloth underground as well to prevent digging predators.  Again, all this takes time, so our chickens lived in the coop in the garage for a solid month before they got moved into their final home!  It would have been MUCH easier and less stressful to have all this in place first!

3.  Chickens are assholes.  Once they are past the “die at any moment” phase, they are really very easy to take care of and are very hardy.  That said, they do tend to be huge assholes to each other.  The “pecking order” really is the pecking each other order, sometimes to death.  My top 2 chickens, Nugget and Drumstick, are constantly battling it out to find out who is on top.  They had a fight at one point and Nugget came out on top, leaving Drumstick with a comb that was hanging halfway off and bleeding.  Nugget recently started missing a bunch of her tail feathers and I realized she’s not top bird any more either.  I’m pretty sure the third dead chicken was partly a result of getting picked on by the others.  My current bottom chicken, Wishbone, constantly looks a bit haggard.  We had to treat her with Blue Cote when she was molting to stain her exposed skin blue because the other chickens kept picking at her red and bloody skin.  I was out at the coop one day and the other three chickens ganged up and pecked at her while she was trapped in a corner until I broke it up.  There’s no way to avoid it, it’s just what they do. They really are just assholes to each other.

4.  Chickens look horrible when they molt.  Seriously.  They look like little heroin addicts.  Don’t be shocked.  Some molt more gracefully than others.  Wishbone, my bottom chicken, looks just awful with hardly any feathers when she molts.  Plus she gets picked on by all the other chickens, so it takes her months to regrow feathers.  I thought there was something wrong with her at first, but she just loses everything at once.  We supplement the chickens with mealworms for extra protein and feed a special food to help them regrow feathers when several of them are molting at once.  Molting still seems to take forever though!

5.  Free eggs are the shit.  Seriously.  My chickens started laying around four months old.  With all four laying, we average 2-3 eggs a day!  Woohoo!  I also learned you don’t have to refrigerate those piles of eggs, because they have a natural anti-bacterial coating on them, so they last a long time (months!) on the counter before you need to eat them. Just wash them right before you crack ’em. They are delicious and healthy and you have tons of them.

6.  There’s nothing worse than having to go to the grocery store and buy eggs when you own chickens.  Your chickens will stop laying at certain points during the year and you will be pissed.  They require many hours of sunlight to lay each egg, so your hens naturally stop laying during the winter when the days are short.  You can put a light in the coop to keep them going, but I figure it’s nature’s way of giving them rest, so I let my hens take a break.  That doesn’t mean I’m not annoyed by it!!  Even worse, in the summer months sometimes one or two will go broody, trying to sit on the nest and hatch those eggs. Yes, you can put them in a cage outside with airflow to break them of it in a few days, but I don’t have a spare crate laying around.  I have no choice but to wait it out and be annoyed she’s sitting on eggs and not laying them. I swear every time I have had to buy eggs I curse my “lazy” chickens for not pulling their weight!!

7.  Chickens are amazing garbage disposals.  I never feel guilty about food waste these days, because almost all our kitchen scraps go to the chickens.  There are certainly a few things they can’t eat, but for the most part, they eat almost all our scraps and leftovers.  Carrots in the fridge getting too old?  Berries go mushy?  Lettuce stumps left? Bananas turn brown? Yogurt expired yesterday? All chicken food!  Our chickens favorite treats are strawberry tops, corn cobs, melon rinds and bread butts.  I even gave them waffles I accidentally burned once and they LOVED it.  There’s a few things they shouldn’t have, like apple seeds, tomatoes and onions, but for the most part our scraps go to our flock, which (bonus!) helps us save money on chicken feed.  Here’s a great list of chicken treats.

8.  Some chickens make great pets while others do not.  They are super entertaining (see: “pecking order”) and are very easy to care for once they are fully grown.  Just feed/water them and collect eggs daily.  I change out their shavings every couple of months (hey – free fertilizer!) and open/close the coop every morning and evening.  Getting the right breed is key to them being good pets.  Some chickens are way more mellow than others.  My Australorpes and Orpington are awesome.  It’s important to handle your chicks from a young age, so they are used to being picked up.  I spent lots of time hanging out with these guys when they were chicks.  These breeds are really great around people and are super mellow.  My Wyandotte, Wishbone, on the other hand, I constantly threaten to kick out for the coyotes to snack on. She’s such a pain in the ass because she is super skittish, despite my best efforts to train her early on.  While I’m sure that some of that comes from being the bottom chicken, her breed is also described as “flighty.”  It turns out, “flighty” is the equivalent of “massive pain in the ass.”  Most of the time, I don’t care, but when I have to catch her for some reason, it takes a minimum of two people swearing and chasing her for at least 10 minutes.  A lot of folks love this breed because they are very pretty chickens.  Ignore the pretty feathers and be sure to read about breed temperament!

All in all, I love having my chickens.  They are great entertainment, provide delicious, organic food for minimal feed cost and after the initial coop setup, are relatively easy to care for.  It’s also great that my kid will learn about the food chain and where his food comes from.  I am looking forward to adding to our flock next year and will be sad when we have to retire our current bunch.  Except for Wishbone…. no tears will be shed for that one.