J and I have wanted chickens for a couple of years, and by law we are allowed to keep up to 20 of them (no roosters) in our yard in the city. 20 chickens sounded a bit excessive to me, but now, I get it. They're like the gateway farm animal. Also, adorable, as I mentioned. Our previous landlord wouldn't let us have chickens at the rental, so as soon as we moved into the house we bought - bam! Chickens. I have an 8' x 10' garden shed in the back yard that has an awning off the side and some shelving under the awning. I enclosed that with chicken wire, and built a roost and nesting boxes out of pallet wood (yay for pallet projects that actually worked!). We are going to continue adding on to it and shoring it up, but for now it keeps chickens in and predators (namely our dog) out. Perfect.
Well, today I decided to turn the chickens out into the garden. You know, let them be chickens. In my mind's eye, I saw them happily clucking and pecking. Fertilizing my garden, eating weeds, and my children would sit on the garden fence with this expression of awestruck wonder while they watched nature in action.
And of course that isn't what happened. We started to let the chickens out, and realized my oldest, G1, isn't a fan of the birds. He had been kinda sneaky about it - he would pet them if you were holding them, and was always suspiciously absent when it was time to go IN to the coop. So, he was no help in getting the birds out of the coop. The younger one, G2, was all for this project. He was chasing chickens all over the place, catching them, and ever-so-not-gently tossing them into the garden. Did you know that chickens are social animals? You have to get the one who literally "rules the roost" where you want her, before the others will be content to be in a new place. This chicken, for us, is Rose. Oh, Rose. I have to say, I won't be sorry when it is time to eat her. She's just MEAN! And since her feathers haven't come in all the way yet, she looks like Death. Well, we finally caught Rose and got her into the garden, and then we got the others - Cali, Del, and Claire - and finally everyone settled in to do their chicken thang.
Rose is the Rhode Island Red (brown chicken) - I'm 99% sure she is a chicken/monster cross breed. Wonder what her eggs will look like...
Cali is the white chicken with black tail feathers (a California White)
Del is the smaller white chicken (a Delaware)
Claire is the small, black, adorable chicken (a Cochin) - guess who is my favorite?
"You girls better not eat my corn or peas!"
See? Always together.
They got to be free-range chickens for about an hour before the kids and I got bored of scanning the sky for hawks. I figure we'll take them out each day and let them get some rec time, kinda like in a maximum security prison, right? And since we are completely new at this, we didn't know how to teach them to go back into the coop, so we grabbed the leader and said "Go inside" and put her in the coop. Then repeat with the other 3. Maybe after a couple of days they will learn what we want when we say "Go inside". Or maybe I'll just be replaying the scene from Rocky II where he has to chase the chicken for the rest of my life. Time will tell.
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