Earthblog

There are foxes everywhere and if you blink they'll steal your chickens.

This point surprised me most on the Tour de Coop, a bicycle tour of Fort Collins area chicken coops on Saturday, May 1st. Apparently, the story of Fantastic Mr. Fox is not too far-fetched, according to the folks who raise chickens. Foxes really can dig very deep, jump very high, and steal a chicken as fast as you can say, “But I put up a fence!” Every chicken farm owner we visited told stories of chickens carried off during the night, or even right under the their nose.

Our first stop on the Tour de Coop was to a coop built like a fortress. Chickens bed down inside a wooden box, but are free to venture outside to a large run* (the size of a large walk-in closet), which is completely surrounded by chicken wire. The owner needed only to lift up a door on the box to find eggs. One good way to keep foxes from digging down under a chicken wire fence is to bend the bottom of the fence outward at a right angle, dig a shallow trench, and bury this L-shaped fence bottom in the trench. A fox will naturally dig close to the fence and on finding a mesh obstacle will never again try to enter the run this way. Nifty idea.

Our second stop was to a neighborhood with three backyard coops, two of which were fairly large, elaborate affairs. I noticed that there were fewer nesting boxes than there were chickens. As it turns out, many chickens will only sit on a nest when they are laying eggs. The third coop off the alley was only about four feet by eight feet and about seven feet tall. When we stopped by, the two hens, one red and one glossy black, were out in the yard. Although the owners weren't expecting us, they very nicely answered our questions, showed us a couple of the eggs they had on hand, and let us pet the gorgeous black hen. Up close her feathers were iridescent blues, purples, and greens and had me greedily imagining headdresses, jewelry and luxurious feathered boas, although I would much prefer stroking this chicken to wearing her!

Once we got outside the city limits we encountered some larger flocks. The first was located in a lovely, landscaped back yard and its coop sported a green roof of hardy plants. There were twenty or so hens of all different sizes and types: fluffy with head plumes, fat and speckled, fuzzy or sm ooth, black, yellow, red and white. They were all precious in the rooster's sight. He was black with almost hair-like feathers. It was only then that I realized that chickens are like dogs. Any rooster can mate with any hen and produce either pure breeds or mutts. The owner noted that crossbred hens sometimes produce unusual eggs: blue with greenish spots or light blue with brownish spots.

I wasn't aware before that not all chickens will sit on their eggs. Many chicks can only grow and hatch in an incubator. (FYI—a fertilized egg and an unfertilized egg look and taste the same. The owner sometimes incubates fertilized eggs to maturity, but she can't bear to butcher her older hens for meat. Instead, any hens she can no longer use go to feed raptor birds at the rescue facility.)

Our next to last stop was to the home of the Todd Simmons, director of Wolverine Farm Publishing (which produces this website). When it comes to bad luck with foxes and dogs, Todd has had the worst. He came home one day to find all of his flock destroyed or stolen. He now has a new flock of about twenty, five-week-old chicks. They aren't cute any longer, having lost all their fuzz after the first few days of life, but the kids in the group were delighted. They pet them warily and entertained themselves for a good twenty minutes, attempting to feed them blades of grass and dandelions. The chicks look like smaller, thinner versions of adult hens, minus the red combs and wattles. The chicks will continue to be kept inside their coop until they are better able to fend for themselves outdoors. Here, we learned that if you let chickens out to forage in an open yard, they need to be watched, but they don't really need to be chased or rounded up. Instead, they naturally make their way back to bed for the night.

At night, chickens prefer to roost in the highest part of the coop to sleep. If there is more than one roosting bar, they will fight to sit on the highest one. Even while they sleep, chickens produce a lot of waste that can be put to use in fertilizing the garden. It must first be turned into compost, however. The nitrogen in chicken poop can initially be literally hot and steaming, making the soil too “hot,” meaning so high in nitrogen that plants cannot grow. The lesson: don't put chicken dung directly onto plants. A large enough compost bed can be used to raise worms which will supplement the chickens' diet.

Chickens who do not eat some form of animal protein, whether it be insects, worms or mice—did you know that chickens are excellent mice killers? —will produce very few eggs. A healthy chicken's diet might include fresh greens like grass cuttings or the vegetable scraps fromgrocery stores or restaurants, animal protein, and chicken scratch (for keeping warm and entertaining themselves). The chicken scratch, a mixture of grains like oats or cracked corn, is high in fat and when eaten just before sleep, keeps the chickens warm at night in colder months. But it is also given as a treat, or just for entertainment—hens will dig for hours through straw to find the scratch grains, especially useful in winter when they must be cooped up inside more often.

Chickens’ instinct to scratch at the ground makes them useful as living Rototillers. You can put chickens inside a chicken tractor, a mobile floor-less chicken coop, often with wheels, that allows chickens to scratch and dig into a different part of the yard each day. It's not only good for improving the health and lushness of your lawn, but it gives the chickens access to fresh greens and bugs as well.

The final leg of the Tour de Coop took us along the bike path from North Taft to Greg Michau's feed store and chicken farm just across from CLP Middle School in Laporte. This was my first time on a bike in over a year. I was worried I wouldn't make it all the way there. Luckily, from start to finish the ride was mostly downhill or flat, and the lovely scenery, the occasional floating hawk, and the bright blue sky kept me distracted as I puffed along. Separated from the pack, I had no one to share the sight of a six-foot garter snake with. He was sunning himself on the bike path. Worried he might get run over, I stopped and shooed him off the warm cement.

At the farm (I made it!), Greg Michau went over the finer points of raising healthy chickens. His chickens are not completely free-range, as they spend most of their time in yards, but this method is 100 times better for the animals than the confining methods of most large production chicken and egg farms. (Did you know that if eggs are labeled “cage free” this means only that the chickens are not packed like sardines into cages? It does not mean that they are running around a green pasture. In the United States “free range” can mean merely that chickens “have access to the outside.” That means that a huge warehouse-type barn with 20,000 chickens might have one small door leading to a tiny outdoor paved patio that could hold less than twenty chickens at a time. Technically, yes, they do have access to the outdoors and can therefore be called “free-range”).

Hearing this news, I felt sickened and cheated. If that's the case, I thought, I am going to go back to the regular old cheap eggs at the grocery store or better yet, I'm going to buy them from a farm such as this one.

Here, at Greg’s farm, we finally saw some of the stereotypical fat white chickens we're used to; the breed is named Cornish Rock. They are lazy and like to sit on their nests for most of the day. These particular hens had been rescued from a research lab where they had been mated too often in order to produce as many eggs as possible. They came to the farm very sickly and torn up. Although they are now happy and healthy, they still have the bad habit of eating all of the food that is given to them, even if it's more than they can stomach. Industrially raised chickens may only be fed only twice a day, which encourages them to keep eating until all the food is gone, whereas a normal chicken eats off and on throughout the day. They should have access to food at all times for this reason.

We also learned that hay and straw are two different things. Alfalfa hay, which is dry but slightly brownish/green still has bits of leaves attached to it and makes good feed for chickens. It allows them to scratch and hunt for those edible bits. Straw, on the other hand, which is much more golden and dry, is what is left over from harvesting wheat. Hay needs to be changed often, whereas straw is very useful for keeping a coop or barn floor dry because even when it gets wet, straw doesn't rot easily.

After this interesting lecture, we were treated to a homemade picnic consisting of salad, locally-produced MouCo cheese, local beer, iced tea, and Michau-Family-raised eggs. The proof that humanely raised chickens lay delicious eggs was in the two fritatas they served. The eggs were bright, yellow and rich tasting.

Raising chickens for their eggs is not the complicated task I imagined it to be. Coops do not have to be elaborate. Surprisingly, chickens are neither smelly nor loud. You can also improve your lawn and garden in the process.

*A run is an enclosed outdoor space where chickens can forage safely. It is often connected to the covered part of the coop by a ramp or ladder.

One place to start to learn about raising chickens in the city is backyardchickens.com. For a quick summary of the usefulness of chicken tractors with pre- and post-tractored lawns, visit http://www.organic-gardening-and-homesteading.com/tractor.html.