Building a Chicken Run

I am attempting to build a chicken run for my babies and I have to say it is not as easy as I was hoping. Mostly because I am building it by myself, going to school full time and trying to take care of the kids. So, basically in the mornings before class I spend about an hour outside trying to get the ground ready just so I can start cutting the wood. At least I have almost all the supplies I need to get it done. I have the redwood and sand. I just need to get the hardware cloth to keep my babies secure. I am also thinking of doing a covered roof, but a clear one so they can still get sun. I also need to find plans on how to make a door so that I am able to get in there and clean and take care of them.  I need to make a planter box that can go on the outside so I can do some Rosemary and Lavender and maybe even some sage. This is all just to keep the bugs down, and not really for any other reason. I know it is a pain in the butt to do this by myself, but it will eventually get done.

With that being said, so far I think I have one for sure Rooster out of my bunch. Seems to me that Susanna the Chicken is now Susanna the Rooster. She stands like a Rooster and even does the Rooster jump at my daughter. I am hoping that I am completely wrong, but I don't think I am.  Here is the cute Susanna the Rooster. 

I have read that Easter Eggers can look like Roosters for a bit and since Olive Eggers are an off shoot of Easter Eggers, it is possible I am totally wrong. I got to say, the more I am learning about chickens, the more I realize I need more space so I can have a bazillion breeds in my backyard. I really want to get a cute little chicken village going on so that I can have a variety of chicken breeds.  When that happens, I will be sure to post photos. 

With that being said, be good to one another. End the hate.

Alpha Updates!

I know it has been a few days, and for that I apologize. I started a new term at school and boy is it crazy. Not only do we have nine classes, one of them has enough homework for all of the classes combined. 

With that being said, Alpha Beech is doing wonderful! She had me worried there for a bit. When I wrote my last post, she still was not eating or drinking any water. I wasn't too worried with the bite itself, as it was not a full puncture. But, I was noticing the shock behavior. If I couldn't get her to eat or drink, then she would die. Thankfully, around 1:35 AM I saw that she pooped. It wasn't a normal pooped and I freaked out. I took her out of the brooder because it was sticking to her bum, cleaned her up and checked out the poop and realized there was a bit of blood in there. I calmed myself down and held her for a moment, cleaned up her wound again and put her back in the brooder. Then the best thing happened, she DRANK WATER! Not a little bit of water, A LOT of water. I ended up watching her a little bit longer and she went poop again and I had to clean her one more time as it was still rather sticky, still a bit of blood in it, but more normal as she drank water. Then she went over and ate some food this time. Once I saw that I decided it was time for me to go to bed. At this point it was already 2:00 AM and I just knew I needed to sleep if I was to be functioning at all. Fast forward to 6:15 AM. I get up and go over to check on the babies and she was already awake and playing with her sisters. Still not as active as normal and not roosting like she was before. I had to clean her little butt off again, but this was the last time I needed to do it. Fast foward to Sunday and she was almost back to herself. The only thing I was not liking was the fact that she was not roosting like she used to and she seemed to be off to the side not hanging out with her sisters.  It's almost been a week since the incident took place now, and I can happily say she is back to her old self. She is no longer crying in pain and is back to roosting and being my little Alpha. She comes to me when I have the safety gate off the top and she will sit next to me when I am reading to them. It is a great feeling knowing that animals can recover from trauma like they do. Here is her wound, which is not fully healed as she needs to grow all her feathers back.

As you can see though, you can barely see her bite mark. We hang out a lot and today she tried her first veggie! I can 100% say she loves mealworms way more. It has been an adventure to watch how fast these little babies grow. It amazes me every single day. To think that in just ten days they have doubled their size. 

On a side note, I have found that some people have made a chicken playground for their little loves and I have decided I will do the exact same thing. I know that they do not need it, and most likely they do not even want it, but hey, it will be entertaining to give them something to play on. I will need to increase the size of the brooder for them, which needs to be done anyway. They are growing at such a rate that they need to have space where they will not beat up on their sisters. They also need a corner in their brooder where the light no longer touches so they can cool off whenever they need it. Anything to keep these loves safe, that is my entire goal . That is all I have for tonight as I am mentally exhausted from school. 

Baby Chicken Disasters

Today we had a run in wih our dog. I wasn't too sure how she would act, and I didn't trust her. My instincts had been correct. She attacked Alpha Beech. My baby. Thankfully I have a chicken first aid kit all set up and good to go and a chicken forum and social media to help me out and calm my butt down. Because boy, let me tell you, I was fully FREAKING out. My baby was scared, running around, and in pain. I am going to show a picture below, it isn't that graphic but it could have been a lot worse, and I will make sure to tell you why. 

So we had been outside. Getting ready to come inside and I was letting my daughter put the babies in the carry box, which is getting to small. (This box will never again be used. I have already gotten a bigger box for next time.) I was holding Amber, our Vizsla. I was already on edge because Amber was pacing before we took them out, lip licking and just not being very calm. Then it happened, Alpha Beech jumped out of the box and right in front of Amber. Amber lunged and jerked me forward just a half inch. That is all it took. She had Alpha in her mouth. I yanked on her collar and she let her go. Alpha went screaming back into the coop. It took me everything to not freak out in this moment. I quickly took Amber inside and out of the way so I could get to Alpha Beech and tend to any wounds. 

I get back to her and it took at least a minute to wrangle her. Felt like an eternity. She was so stressed and scared. I get her inside to inspect and I see that thankfully she is not fully punctured, but enough that it will cause issues with her sisters. I clean and disinfect the wound. I then put on triple antibiotic onto the wound to prevent infection. I put her in the brooder to help warm her up and then I notice she is getting picked on. So I ended up holding her for a few hours and keeping her warm so she can have time to rest. It is important that she gets the rest in so she doesn't have any issues healing. 

I know she will be okay, I just wish she didn't have to go through this in the first place. My advice is to train your dog to be good to birds before it is an issue.  You don't want to be in my situation where you have an injured bird and have to wonder if she is going to be okay and then have to change the brooder to make sure she is safe at night.  Worse case scenario I would need to create a crate inside of the brooder to place miss Alpha in so that she is afe and secure while she is still able to be in contact with her sisters. The other issue that would take place would be removing her  completely and then I would have to go through a process to reintroduce her to the flock, which can take a few weeks to do. 

Thankfully, everything seems to be going okay and she should have a full recovery. 

Baby Chicks and Brooders

Ok, you want to start raising babies, great! The best advice I can give you is Research , Research,  Research.  Then when you think you have finished researching,  research some more. There is no right way to do it, but there are a hell of a lot of wrong ways to do it.  That is why raising chickens can be a little overwhelming.  I thought I had all the information I needed when I got the babies, boy, was I wrong. I am only a week and a half in and I had to upgrade my brooder size. This was due to my first five Olive Eggers doubling their size in a week, plus adding three new Lavender Orpington babies. I notice one of the three was not being included and shoved around. She was literally getting walked on. I realized at that moment, it could be due to several things, one being the size of the brooder.  

What is a brooder? Let's get to hen basics real quick. In the chicken world we have what is called a broody hen. This is basically your momma hen who sits on the egg. She may be a bit grumpy because she limits the time she gets off of her eggs to eat and use the restroom.  Her entire job for 21 to 30 days is to sit on her eggs and help them hatch by being that source of warmth and humidity.  Then, once they hatch she continues for the next few weeks to keep the babies warm and fed.  Hence, a brooder box.

The first few days is critical to chick life. You need to make sure the brooder is the proper temperature (based on hen and where you live) and thoroughly cleaned. For my chicks, the temperature started at 98° F. This normally is supposed to drop 5° a week until the temperature matches outside. However, you really should be listening/watching your chicks during this sensitive time. Their behavior is what should dictate how fast or slow you change the heat lamp. If they are panting and holding those wings out, by God you make sure to cool it off quicker. Chickens don't sweat and can die of heat stroke easily.  In a small brooder box, they have no way to get away from the heat to cool down. That's only one issue with a smaller box. The other issue I was running into was boredom and not enough space. Here was the size of my old brooder. (Please excuse the hot mess of a room, I am not used to housing baby chickens in my bedroom.)  

Two chewy boxes mashed together for a total of eight baby chickens. It was beginning to be a bit much.  My poor baby, who happens to be the smallest was just getting picked on and I felt she was giving up. First thing I did was put electrolytes in the water to help perk her up. Next, I went to the store and purchased large boxes and a ton of supplies.  All these supplies cost me less than 20 bucks as I am just using shipping supplies.  You do NOT need to buy fancy brooders online as this is temporary housing. But, that is ultimately up to you. I put four of these large boxes together and then used any extra cardboard to place on the bottom. I wanted to add as much padding as possible to prevent moisture and leakage.  I then added a layer of parchment paper, followed by puppy pee pads, then pine shavings. Due to me being paranoid,  I put another layer of puppy pads over the shavings so I could monitor my baby chicks poop. I then added a corner with some shavings and two new areas where the food and water was elevated to prevent them from being defected in. This is what the new brooded looks like.

Already a hot mess after 2 minutes. The good news is my baby Artemis who I was worried about, has appeared to do better with this set up. I will continue to monitor and hope for the best.

Now, why am I monitoring the poop? I found myself freaking out about the poop because of chicken diseases.  Apparently,  the number one killer or baby chickens is Coccidiosis. This is the parasite I spoke briefly about in a previous post. You can see this in poop, so naturally I want to make sure I don't miss it. Since I am home right now, as most are, I am using this opportunity to make sure all is well and being extremely over the top helicopter chicken mom. If you are curious what normal chicken poop looks like for your flock, I did find this site to be helpful. You can of course avoid this stress by getting medicated feed and help your babies build their immune system. I messed up and spent a lot of money on feed that I thought was medicated,  but it was just organic.  So, here we are with me stressing out with every little abnormality.  It is all a learning moment and in the future, I know what to do. And what not to do.

I by no means know it all, I can only provide insight from my personal experience and from what I have read in the books. I also get a lot of tribal knowledge on different forums and social media.  With social media, I do try to back that information up with what I have read in books. For example, I will not give my babies Ivermectin without consulting a Veterinarian first. This is an off label drug that normally isn't given to chickens and I would hate it if I hurt them because I listened to the internet because it worked for a handful of people.

I do hope that with my experiences,  I can help you out in some way. I had chickens when I was younger, and being able to raise them as an adult has been rewarding. I do recommend not having the brooder in your room though...the only reason I am blogging at 1am is because I cannot sleep. These cuties decided to get the zoomies around midnight and woke me up, and just went back to sleep.  House them in a different room, and if you are a helicopter chicken mom like me, get a baby cam. 

Adding to Our Flock

Adding to your flock can be tricky. It is recommended that if you are introducing babies, you should do it within the first week of life. Thankfully, my Olive Eggers are only a week and two days old. Today they met their three new sisters, Athena, Artemis and Aphrodite. Beautiful three day old Lavender Orpingtons. Very calm and very sweet little girls that I got within my home town.  The other issue you want to consider is diseases. There are things such as Marek's, which will kill your entire flock and then there is Coccidiosis. This is more common. Coccidiosis can be deadly, especially in baby chicks. This is an intestinal parasite that basially prevents the chicken from absorbing the needed nutrients for survival.  The most common way for babies to get this disease is by eating the feces in their brooder. They are babies and don't fully understand that they should not be eating the poop on the ground, and they generally don't have their mom to tell them no.  It takes the chickens about six months to build up that immunity to fight off this parasite effectively. You can help by feeding your chicks medicated starter.  This is also treatable by adding Amprolium to the chicken's water supply for seven days. If you are doing non medicated feed, you can also add probiotic supplements to the water. This helps so that the chicks get a good gut bacteria going and reduce the chance of infection. The best way to help prevent this is to clean your brooder as often as possible. Keep it clean and dry and clear of poop. 

The other issue of adding to your flock ... Temperature control. I now have birds that are closer to 90 degrees for their need. However, my new babies need to be around 98 degrees. The brooder I have is large enough to have one side close to the 98 mark and the other near the 90. But I find the Uncle Marty the Chicken is being a good broody hen already at one week old and she is taking care of these babies under the higher heat. She is panting to make sure they are warm. SOOO here I am waiting up and watching to make sure she doesn't overheat herself and have issues. It is a very stressful situation, though I am happy to see she will be a good mommy someday if I allow my hens to breed.  All in all, it has been a good chicken day, and I am happy to share it will you all.  

Getting Back Up After Failure

I know it isn’t easy to get back up after you lose so many chickens. I had a really hard time figuring out what I wanted to do. My daughter was completely devastated, and I wasn’t doing too great either.  However, I know I really wanted to give it another shot. The person I received my eggs from gave me a call and said he had a friend that lived 45 minutes away who was selling day old chicks in a week. I thought about it and decided to give her a call. It wasn’t the breed I was looking for, but it was at least some chickens.  I went ahead and called her up and secured five babies to join our family starting the first week of May. This would give us enough time to grieve our lost chickens and prepare a new, safe brooder for some day-old chickens. It gave me some more time to read a few more books as well.  To this day, I am still reading and still researching as I do not feel I will ever have enough information.  I have to say that I have found a forum that has saved my life. Backyardchickens.com has completely, 100% walked me off the cliff I put myself on. Knowing that incubation isn’t as easy as I thought it was, and most thought I was nuts for trying it when I haven’t touched anything remotely close to farm animals in years, actually made me feel better. If you are new to chickens and need help, I recommend this site, and I have a permalink at the bottom of my blog. I am in now way affiliated with the site, I just really find them extremely helpful and welcoming. 

 With that being said, I did mention early I have five chickens, what I didn't mention is I also have three more on the way. I originally wanted Lavender Orpingtons and I found some. I do have some coming in. I can only house a few where I live, 8 total. I will have the 5 Olive Eggers and 3 Lavender Orpingtons. I did create an Instagram page (Link below) to showcase them growing up, but this page is more of a dialog on their lives and what we are going through as a chicken family to make it happen. To share what it takes to raise chicken in a City, with neighbors.  I will of course show off some of the photo’s here as well.  Here is a picture of GrayGray, who my son has named. 

The other issue we will run into is the Olive Eggers are not sexed. They are straight run. We will not know if they are Roos or Hens until a bit later on. I have my suspicions that we may have two Roos. However, I can hope that they are all hens, so we do not have to get rid of any of them. There are experts who can “vent sex”. This can be dangerous if you do not know how to do this. If you do this wrong you can damage the babies vent and basically, you kill them. I do not recommend you vent sex unless you are a trained professional. Other breeds you can feather wing sex, this would be done in Rhode Island Red and New Hampshire Breeds, alas I don’t have those.  Then I have also read that if you pick up a day-old chick and place them on their back, if she kicks, it is a Roo, if she doesn’t, it is a hen. So, you see, the best way to know if your hen is a hen, is to wait to see if she Crows, or if she lays an egg.  Please pray for me that they all lay eggs. I would hate to have to give up one of my kiddos favorite chickens because it is a Rooster and not a Hen. 

New To Incubation - Disasters Can Happen

For people raising chickens, you will understand this. For those new to chickens as I am, you may not fully get this until it happens to you.

 Here I was, incubating my first six chicken eggs. Starting small because I was not sure how this would all play out. All six of my Lavender Orpington’s had seemed to be progressing normally. I was doing my normal checks, had some issues with candling, so I decided to just leave all the eggs in the incubator and hope for the best.  We get to day 18 and it is time for lockdown. I raise the humidity as I was told, and I was doing my final check on the eggs and I only heard one of them peeping inside the egg, AND it already had a pip! Super early for a pip and a bit scary as we had to take the eggs out to do a check and I read that it could cause some issues.  So back in the incubator we go, and I was struggling to keep the humidity above 60%. I was stressing out so bad.  FINALLY, at day 23 an egg is hatching! 32 hours go by and she's struggling, she has the same hole and it looks like her wing is slightly stuck out of the shell, and she isn't moving.  I find out that my daughter opened the incubator while I was in the shower and I go in full panic mode. What do I do? Do I help the chick, do I not help the chick? I wait another day. Still no forward progress, I do a ton of research and it was decided that I help the baby hatch. I carefully take off the outer shell while leaving the membrane attached, just enough so baby is able to push through if she can and I notice that the membrane in some places is drying out and that the baby is COMPLETLY backwards and still stuck. I put her back for a few more hours to see if she can get out.  I come back and she is still not moving but chirping and pecking away at the same hole. Finally, I realize she literally is not able to rotate, she's too big for her egg. This entire process stresses me out because at this point, I know that I shouldn't be opening the incubator because the other eggs are at risk, but I don't know how to save her. Do I let her die in her egg or do I risk it again and help some more? I pull out a second incubator and get it to the proper humidity and heat levels, quickly move over the remaining five eggs (this was HOURS later) and then I finally help Baby Hope out of her shell completely. Her yolk sac was completely absorbed, and she was good to go, she was just stuck.  So, I put her in the incubator in hopes of normal recover. Fast forward to Day 1 of life. She isn't drying off and membrane is still stuck to her body. What is going on! I don't understand. 

 

I find out she is what they call a sticky chick, and she can't even stand. I do more research and I help clean her up and get the membrane off in hopes of getting her well. She seems to be doing better, we just can't get her to stand up. I realized that maybe she needs to be in the brooder, so I swap her over there.  Sadly, this was the mistake I made that cost her, her life. The brooder was a bit too much for Baby Hope, and this is what killed her.  Though it was finally helping her dry out after her several baths, it was slightly too hot for her due to all that she went through. The stress and new environment quickly killed her.  I can't say for sure if she was going to be able to survive as she wasn't able to stand up on her own, she kept falling over to her left every time she tried to stand up. But I do know it was my fault completely that she died. Being a first-time hatcher, and chicken owner I was devastated, and I cried for hours. We buried her in the backyard and I know in the future two things, I will be investing in a really expensive industrial incubator if I ever do this again, and I will make sure that I put a pad lock on the doors if I am not around to prevent them from being opened before they should.  It doesn't matter if you tell your kiddos to not open the doors, if they are excited to see a baby, and they can't see in, they will open that door to get a closer look. It was a hard lesson for all of us that had been involved. 

Needless to say, the other eggs did not hatch after 27 days.  I finally called it and we went ahead and did a final check to see if they had lived. I pulled out my stethoscope to listen for peeps or any signs of life and there had been none. We decided to open the eggs and see where they had died. One egg was not fertilized at all. The other four seemed to have made it full term and died right around day 18 when the humidity was having some issues as they had drowned in their eggs. Incubating is a tough gig if you have never done it before. But I do recommend it if you have the patience and acceptance of knowing that you may not be successful your first time around.