Lime the Chicken’s badly timed winter moult

Posted by louisa on Thursday 6 January 2011 in chickens | 3 comments

You know when it was really cold a fortnight ago? When it was minus frickin’ 17C so nights and didn’t get above freezing at all for a fortnight or more? That was the time when one of our chickens, Lime, thought it would be a good idea to start her first moult.

Or rather that’s when I really noticed – looking back at pictures now, I can see she was losing feathers in late November – it just reached a critical mass in that cold snap in December – and it worried me a lot.

Lime has always been my favourite of the chickens – she was the first one we could identify (she had black flecks in her neck feathers) and from the start, she was the friendliest. She’s the only one to have jumped up on my shoulders/back (John says I look like a strange “farmer pirate” when she does it) and always wants to be as close to me as possible when I’m in the run. Her personality reminds me of our cat, Carla – and since me noticing her moult coincided with Carla having a cold and Lily-dog having food poisoning, I was already stressed about beloved animal illness!

During the coldest weather, I kept a close eye on her – she got a lot of warm porridge hand feeding and other treats, all including generous quantities of poultry spice (a mineral booster). I thought about making her a jacket but thought it might stress her out further so had it as a last resort plan. Thankfully her feather loss seemed to slow at that point and then eventually the weather got warmer too so I’ve not had to do it yet. She lost a lot of feathers on her neck and on her back & breast – but retained enough on her back & breast so she didn’t look completely bald, just white and scruffy. This pic shows her next to one of her sisters – she looked as red and fluffy as that before the moult started.

Over the last few days, we started seeing some great regrowth around her neck – yesterday the new pin feathers looked just like thin paper tubes (they’re actually a keratin sheath) but now little feathers are sticking out the end like super fine paintbrushes.

I suspect she might not be out of the woods yet but it’s still nice to see regrowth, to know that it won’t last forever and within, hopefully, a month or so, she’ll be back to normal.

About Buff, our buff Leghorn chicken

Posted by louisa on Thursday 30 December 2010 in chickens | 0 comments

Here are a few fun facts about Buff, the optical illusion-tastic chicken:

She’s a pure breed – a Leghorn – a buff coloured one hence the unimaginative name.

She’s about 21 weeks old at the moment but since she hit point of lay at the coldest, darkest part of the year, she’s not actually started laying yet. When she does, she’ll lay about 280 white eggs each year.

She’s the most flighty of our birds (the rest of bred-to-be-calm hybrids) and by far the smallest – this photo shows the difference in size between her and one of the ISAs (Ms Blue – admittedly they are older though).

Her best friend in the coop is Ginger, the Black Rock who looks like she’s had ginger highlights put into her feathers. When they first arrived, they were the bravest of the new ones so stuck together to explore. Now the other Black Rock, Blacks, is bravest of them but these two still stick together most of the time. (She’s in the background of the photo above too.)

When she first moved in, she used to eat out of my hand – very timid pecking – but now she doesn’t at all. She’s the only girl who doesn’t run towards me when I enter the run to say hello and check my clothing for hidden caches of corn. But she didn’t seem to mind me stalking her for a photo session this morning.

The other chickens don’t like it when I’m trying to take her photo though: look at me, mum, look at me!!

Optical Illusion

Posted by louisa on Thursday 30 December 2010 in chickens | 2 comments

I had a lie in this morning. Not only is it the do-nothing week between Christmas and New Year, I’m self-employed so my boss is very, very understanding when I want to stay in bed rather than start work on time. It’s also been well above freezing for the last few days so I’ve not had to worry about the chickens & their frozen-solid drinkers for the first time in a month.

Or did I have to worry about the chickens after all?

When I finally woke up, I did so with the air of getting up, weeing, getting a cup of tea and returning to bed for a leisurely morning. Then I looked out of the bedroom window and noticed that Buff, the Buff Leghorn, seemed to be outside the chicken run – in the airlock space between the run and the rest of the garden. The run is enclosed as completely as it can be (some rats have made incursions over winter – we’ll see them as soon as the soil is workable), with a full (wire) roof to stop them escaping or foxes/cats/dogs jumping in. There was no way she could have got out. Or was there?

Still blurry eyed, I went to a different window – she still seemed to be outside, stood on top of the metal food dustbin. There is an old patio chair of a similar height just on the inside of the run’s wire but I couldn’t see any wire between me and her. I began to panic. They’d be no weeing or teaing for me!

I dressed as quickly as possible and ran down through the house, gathering John along the way. He asked my first questions: “how did she get out? how are you going to get her back in?” She’s considerably flightier than the others so doesn’t usually let me within a few feet of her, let alone pick her up.

How long had she been out there? Overnight? Unprotected and cold? Had a fox got in and made an exit? Was she hurt? Were the others hurt? The questions raced through my mind as fast as I raced through the house.

She was still there when we reached the first level of the garden – standing on one leg, a little chilly, looking a little lost. I ran faster.

Then as I hit the bottom of the steps – the two flights of stairs between the top of the garden and their coop – the perspective changed and she was clearly perfectly comfortably perched on the patio chair inside the wire.

Bloomin’ chickens.

Frozen egg

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 21 December 2010 in chickens | 2 comments

Like Frugaldom & her quail eggs, there was a frozen egg waiting for me in the nest box this morning.

I suspect it was laid later yesterday, after my collection run, so was in there overnight.

Needless to say, I felt the pathological need to crack it open (albeit after it had been sat in the house for about 15mins). It was like frozen jelly inside.

Butternut squash rind soup for the chickens

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 8 December 2010 in chickens | 0 comments

I made some spicy butternut squash soup for our lunches this week and as usual, cut off the rind before cooking.

If the rind is thin, it doesn’t really need cutting off – but the soup is so deliciously smooth that I don’t want to risk coming across bits of tough rind in it.

There isn’t really enough squash meat left on the rind for the chickens to be able to pick it off but I decided to boil up the small pieces of the rind in some veg water from earlier in the evening and see what happened.

What happened was I didn’t put enough water in then forgot about it and burnt it. Sigh. It’s the first thing I’ve ever properly burnt on the stove – it smelled like Halloween & Sunday roasts from childhood (when the carrots caught occasionally).

But at least some of it was salvageable – I took out the worst of the burnt bits and added a little more water. The result was a fairly thick soup (made from the squash meat left on the rind), with soft rind pieces.

I served it lukewarm as their warming lunch treat and the chickens loved it. Next time, I’ll try not to burn it.

Chickens in winter – still rewarding but so much more work

Posted by louisa on Friday 3 December 2010 in chickens | 11 comments

Sorry if this blog as got a bit one note of late – all winter! winter! winter! It’s partly because I’m reluctant to post any recipes at the moment (I’ve got a few I want to write up but I think our oven thermostat is broken so I want to check that because saying “bake this at 230 for 30 minutes”, when really it needs 10 minutes at 180) and partly because the weather is a little … in our faces at the moment.

We’re not used to this. Even after our “once in 20 years” bad winter last year, we weren’t really ready for this – and especially not starting so early. I know a lot of people in north America and mainland Europe have it far, far worse for far longer but if I lived in Canada or Sweden, I’d expect it and be prepared for it but we’re just not used to it here. It was a balmy -6C/20F outside at noon today – it had been much, much colder overnight. I grew up on the sea-warmed coast (sunny sunny Southport) – we didn’t have either hills or snow there so trudging up and down the first in 8ins of the second is a very new experience to me.

We’re also not used to waking up to find these outside our kitchen window in the morning:

The in-need-of-filling bird feeder looks like wax has been poured on it.

It also makes me slightly regret how much I’ve been urging people to get chickens because they’re so easy to look after. My chicken-related workload has shot up over the last week – many many times more involved, although I guess that’s because they were so little effort before.

Last weekend’s big coop clean took a good three times as long – having to scrap the frozen poo off the floor – but that’s not so bad – it’s the daily tasks that are more time consuming.

In the morning, I have to defrost their drinkers as soon as I wake up. Sometimes that involves just using boiling water to melt the ice and top up the water levels (so it’s lukewarm for them to drink). Other mornings it means carrying the drinkers back up to the house (up three flights of icy steps) to defrost the solid water and refill. And some mornings, like today, it means carrying the drinkers up to the house, defrosting them, refilling them, carrying them back down, flipping them over to hang them up, the bottom coming off, the lukewarm water going everywhere over the run floor and having to start all over again, with a nice ice rink in the run to meet me when I return – and the floor of the run was already too cold for two feet as it was.