You might have been looking at birds over a week or so old?


@Kitties-with-Sigs

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That is correct.

I buy my chicks (shipped to central VA from Ohio)every year from Meyer hatchery. Never had a wrong sex or fail to thrive bird yet. I can’t recommend them any harder. Pretty sure they usually have good deals on sex links.

https://www.meyerhatchery.com/productinfo.a5w?prodID=GBUS

chicken folks - anyone have/had Bielefelder chickens?  I've got a small batch due to hatch this Friday, and I'm pretty excited about the breed from what I've read.  Auto-sex, big large framed dual purpose, large brown eggs, good cold tolerance, supposedly pretty mellow and not high-strung, and the aesthetics are there for those that that matters to (I like a pretty chicken).

okay, I have my work cut out for me.

Wife is expecting her six chicks most any time. We bought Barred Rocks this time. She has her little hatchery set up in the LIVING ROOM, for God's sake; it's a large dog kennel (to keep our 5 cats out) with a storage tub. She's got bedding, a 75w. heat lamp, chick feed, chick waterer... wonder what we've missed?

We're still getting 45-55 degree nights here in Idaho so an outside roost for them is out of the question. We are going to put their coop in the same 10 x 10 dog run we had our last chickens in.

And before you ask, there is a local charity that will accept our excess cholesterol pills eggs.

Anyone think of anything we've missed?

Frank, we had our first chicks in the front bedroom for a month or two.  
There will be dust.  
Not just dust, but epic dust!  Be prepared for it.  
Don't put them anywhere near electronics or anything else that dust can get into, like HVAC.

When my wife opened up the box of chicks in the post office parking lot, she pulled out a bottle of pedialyte and used an eyedropper to give the chicks a drink.
All 22 survived.

Why out of the question?
I don’t do heat lamp, I do “mama heat pad” which is just a 10 dollar Sunbeam from amazon. My chicks have been outside since day 1. They are 14 days old today, and it was 31 degrees outside last night. They are totally fine.

15 days old, switched them to horizontal nipples today. This is one of my hen buckets. When they come off heat a couple weeks this will go outside in the run.

This Friday it will be in the 80s, so I will be opening their coop door in the daytime and verifying they successfully navigate the ramp. I’ll still close the coop door at night for maybe a week after that before I start closing it. By this Friday afternoon or Saturday, if they are ramp-smart, I will also open the chick trap doors and if it goes like my previous batches, they’ll be integrated with the hens in a matter of a couple of hours.

Last thing to do is transition them to the adult feeder but I like them to be 21-25 days old before that so they can reach in the PVC elbow.

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They will stink. And otherwise be nasty and messy.

I brood mine in the barn for the first week or two with a heat lamp then I move them to outdoor brooders with heat plates on legs they can huddle under.

One question: Do chickens know what's bad for them? We have an abundance of weeds on our property. In NM our chickens ate anything in the yard: burrs, sand grass, goats head (the plant that grows them, not the burrs themselves)- anything that gets in their way.

We have some castor bean plants which I'm going to get rid of, but there will probably be some that I miss.

Mine seem to. But like I’ve said elsewhere my thing is game and heritage breeds. Tough free-rangers that live a bit like wild turkeys. I see lots of accounts of peoples’ feed store chickens dying of poisonous plants. It one of several observations that’s led me to believe that the hatchery system has weakened the free-range survivability of many chicken breeds.

I would suspect that any chickens that free range will be more selective with their food than chickens locked in a sand run all say. The enclosed chickens may eat anything offered to them, even if poisonous.

We got into the chicken game this year with 3 free hens and 20 pullets from the hardware store.  They're in a fully enclosed 40'x80' run that has 2 coops.  We're going to expand it further to about 40'x160' as time allows and I'd like to add some birds that are a little more on the exotic/neat looking side.  

The Rhode Island Reds aren't terribly keen on people, but the Cinnamon Queen hen tolerates us and will occasionally eat out of my hand.  The teenagers are kind of like puppies.

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Switching from large cattle panel tractors to smaller PVC tractors.  Kids are getting big enough to manage the chickens as part of their chores and I wanted a design that they could move themselves.  Building 3 tractors, the below is the prototype.  The next two will have a few refinements, but overall happy with it.  Roughly 10'x5', two nest boxes and a small roost area - plan to have 8 birds per tractor.  The welded wire is energized with a tiny 3.0 volt DC, .04 joule charger which packs a modest 3k volts - should be adequate to discourage most all predators.

Threw together a simple mobile coop for my birds and graduated my ducks and goose into it this week. They were inside my cabin since I got then and since the quadrupled in size, compared to the chicks, I thought that I would give them a larger home, and give the chicks a break from them. It is a coop based of Joel Salatin's design and though it is a temp coop right now I will use it for my meat birds in the future as well as a place to separate any broody hen when they are hatching their own eggs. It is light enough that I can pull it to fresh grass every day or so and once my portable electric net arrives it will be very secure.

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First day of free ranging.

We just lost our Easter Egger, so in about two weeks my 2020 chick batch will be off heat (Blue Splash Andalusian, blue Splash Marans, Austra White, and SLW) and so today I impulse decided to order 3 x Cream Legbars from Meyer for June 1 hatch date. It will be my first year doing two batches of chicks and they also will be the first breed I’ve ever owned more than one of! Only way to get colored eggs on that hatch date and I can’t do any later with a July vacation.

they will be “The Schuyler Sisters” and joining 2 year old Barred Plymouth Rock and one year olds of red sex link, white leghorn, and a Dominique. Between the brown egg layers, the Leghorn and Austra White, the Marans and the CLs I expect to have a darn good looking Easter basket next year!

What is the hive’s opinion on lighting coop over winter to keep production up? I just think I’ll have a lot of hard winter and over bountiful summer if I try to adjust flock size accordingly, or waste a lot of chickens by eating 5 1.5 year olds every fall. My cousin feels her chickens had a lot of egg problems after lighting them through winter.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that if you add light, do it in the morning hours.  In the morning they can get up earlier when the lights come on.  If you add it in the evening, they may be outside and not know that the light is about to go off.  Then they have to get to the roost in the dark and may not roost well.  Chickens don't see well in the dark.

Your birds will stop producing eggs sooner in their lives.

@Kitties-with-Sigs
The closer half was already built.  What's not pictured is a goat shed.  We expanded the run by 24' with 2x4s and a roll of 6'x150' chicken wire.  We opened up the far "wall" and turned it into a section of the long "wall" and went crazy with the staple gun.  The 4x4x8s and roof of the coop make it so you can stand up without any issues.  The freestanding coop was in another part of that pen with the legs buried in the ground.  A little chainsaw action, mounted some skis, and we towed it with a tractor and a chain.  Its very heavy. The pen is about 200'x50' with 5' fencing and we clipped their wings to keep them in it.  We still need to run a water line. The tall grass was mowed today so hopefully the ladies will keep it down.  We want to build another coop and add some meat birds, a few turkeys, and some "exotic" chickens.  

The hen in the foreground is pretty tame and the littles act like puppies when you open the gate, with the exception of Turk the turken.  She doesn't like people very much.  We had breakfast for dinner tonight and their eggs were quite tasty.  

Its basically a community chicken run.  Our little 'hood is 8 foster homes that specialize in large groups and in total there are 53 kids here right now so we tend to do things that seem excessive or large-scale compared to normal families.  The kids love the chickens, one neighbor has 3 goats and a sheep, and we're kicking around the idea of getting some pigs.  We also have about 1400 square feet of garden, splash pad and park, a river at the back of the property, 4 deer stands and a blind (one of the fosters took a doe in October) , and I'm putting in a 25 yard pistol range with steel targets. I'm hoping the wife gets me an electronic clay pigeon thrower for Father's Day.

I guess if you had to be in the system then this is the place to be.

And now we are talking about getting meat chickens.  Talk about snowballing.

This years batch is growing, they have a week before they get kicked out of the baby side of the coop and 3 new chicks come in the mail. Attached File

Four week old chicks with hens

Tossed an extra corn in the cob in the run this evening and who decided to be brave and take a go for it but my Austra White pullet “Romeo”.

this is my third generation with this method and I wouldn’t change a thing. The integration is completely stress free, once I’ve confirmed the chicks use the ramp to their side of the coop.

Folks have had success with this method. I have seen much bigger (wider, not taller) versions and others recommend obstacles / corner blockers etc. I haven’t had an issue there but they do have a lot of pluses.
These chicks have been doing this each day, 24-7, for a week and a half now, and another 5 days till they are with hens full time as a new batch of day old chicks arrives.

That's no joke.  We need to do a small test batch to make sure that I'm up to killing them.

Some critter has been getting into the run at night eating the laying pellets so we put a couple of game cams in to see what was getting in. At around 10:30 two raccoons have been coming in for a feed and hanging out until around 4:00-4:30. Tonight we’re setting up shop to pop them.

bushmaster069 1
raccoon             0

Ducks..... well being ducks.....after a rain storm.

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I want some ducks.

@Kitties-with-Sigs

Would love to have you out here sometime!

Wrapped up the 2nd tractor.  A few minor improvements, mostly at the front.  

If anyone wants a materials  (eta: added below) and cut list, let me know and I'll put that together.

A few pics and details:

The rear.  The black band is 1/2" irrigation tubing I slit and am using it as edging on the siding panel to minimize water damage to the core of the panel.  Nesting box access is door 1'x2'.  The white panel is a plastic UV resistant wall panel and the grey is a contractor grade poly woven weed block that is also UV treated.  The grey panel acts as shade block but still lets water/air flow through.


Shows how I notched the back wall panel to fit.  The "tongue" of the panel is screwed into the back PVC pipe.


I kept two rows of wire fence as an overhang/"skirt".  The idea is I can push it down to cover dips/holes/gaps in the ground.  Remember, the wire is energized, so any predator that pokes a nose at it to try and dig/climb/reach will get popped.  The chickens aren't bothered by it - feathers are poor conductors if they brush up against it and the walls are vertical enough that they don't do that much anyway.


The tiny energizer.  Runs on 2 Ds presently and looks like I'm getting about a month from a fresh set.  Would last longer if I didn't let the "skirt" contact so much grass.  I bought some buck converters and plan on hooking up a small solar panel and 12v battery to each tractor to negate the need to swap batteries.



The nesting "boxes" are 2 buckets with the top quarters cut off and a half lid as the end cap.  I put one fastener through the center of the bucket with a fender washer from the interior.  Then I drilled an over-sized hole at an angle through the back wall and the bucket near the bottom of the bucket and dropped a nail through the hole.  The nail keeps the bucket from turning, but I can pull the nail from the backside of the tractor, reach through the access door and spin the bucket upside down to clean it out.


Detail showing the top cross bar of 1/2" metal conduit.


Refined front.  No longer using any of the siding panel.  The dimensional lumber used was cypress 2x3 - and in most cases cut those in half as 1.5x1.5s  Excuse the gaudy brass hinges, I have a bucket full of old ones from where I replaced all the hinges in the house.


Parts list:

I have two permanent coops for my flocks, but for my chicks and meat birds I use chicken tractors.  I love these tractors by John Suscovich.   Sturdy and easy to move.  

https://farmmarketingsolutions.com/stress-free-chicken-tractor-plans

Anyone have any idea what is going on with this hen’s feathers?

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She housed with a rooster or two?  Looks like the chicken equivalent of post coitus bed head.

Negative, 2 other hens and 20 pullets that should start laying in a couple of months, but the hens sleep in their own coop.

Feather picking, I bet.  Increase the hens protein either by changing their food, or adding supplements like meal worms.

I’ll get the 20% protein layer pellets. I’ve been giving them black soldier fly larvae a couple of times per week.

"That black thing has an apple on it.  Can I eat it?"

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We had three Cochin hens go broody lately.  One, a gray Cochin named Chubby, is 3 years old and has gone broody before, but we always just let her wait it out and eventually get over it.  
This time I went to Tractor Supply and picked up their minimum order of 4 pullets, White Leghorns, and stuffed them under her in a brooder we had kept together for just such an event.
Chubby was so happy!  The chicks have been doing very well with their new mama and all is fine.

So I thought, what about the other two hens?  I went back to the store and picked up 10 Golden Sexlink pullets.  Put half under each hen.  It didn't work.  This was their first time going broody and they just weren't mature enough for it.
One wanted nothing to do with the chicks and the other attacked them.

Those chicks will get raised by Mama Heating Pad for awhile.

Anyway, just a tale for some chicken folks to read...