Chickens are charming because they are innately curious, busy-body birds. They’re in constant motion, investigating new things (is this shiny droplet food?), socializing, scratching, pecking, dozing, and chasing (each other and anything small that moves that might be edible.) Unless they are outside in a large and complex environment, they get bored. Boredom, as with all animals, leads to trouble. With chickens, that trouble leads to bad behaviors, like pecking each other, and pulling out feathers (their own and others). Chickens that would otherwise be high-status hens become bullies. Chickens that would otherwise be wallflowers are cornered and pounded on. When that happens, you end up with a flock that has more in common with its dinosaur ancestors than with the delightful farm animals that you’d imagined.

In many backyard situations, chickens are housed in a too-small confines, with a dirt yard and nothing to do. They’re fed treats, like cracked corn, that they fill up on quickly. This is bad for their systems, and they get fat, which leads to egg-laying issues and disease. Add boredom to the mix, and it can be a lethal situation. But, proper housing and management can alleviate all of these issues!

Assuming that you have enough space for your flock, (I’ve written about minimum coop and pen sizes here) what follows are ways to keep your hens from being bored.

Uppermost in a chicken’s mind is eating. A hen is hard-wired to search for food by looking and scratching. It’s not enough to provide pellets out of a feeder, as that need to hunt and peck will end up being focused on something else (like a hen at the bottom of the flock’s status or eating feathers.) Provide places to scratch and things to peck that will last hours, if not all day.

Watermelon, pumpkins, and other large, hard-shelled foods can be put out for your hens and will keep them busy for hours. These foods are also a healthy addition to their diet (unlike the sweet high calorie feed blocks that I don’t recommend.)

 

Provide a decomposing log for them to peck at. Move it around once a week or so to expose the soft ground and bugs underneath.

 

What keeps my hens the busiest is the compost pile inside of the chicken run. This photo shows a mess of green weeds that I’ve just put in there. The girls will pick out bugs, eat the greens and shred the rest. They’ll dig down and turn over the compost. It is an endlessly fascinating place for them. They’ll get good things to eat and stay busy, and I’ll get rich, loose dark dirt in a month.

 

Provide something new for them to investigate. Simply putting in a pine branch will make their day.

 

Although chickens don’t fly (at least not well, it’s more like the dancing hippos in Fantasia) they do like to get up off the ground, and they like height options. Provide outside roosts. (Not every chicken gets to have conversations with goats, but they do like interacting with other species.)

 

They also like stumps.

 

Dust baths are essential both for health and for the social life of the flock. The run should have a loose pile of dirt to get into.

 

You have to give your flock things to do during inclement weather. Just like children can drive a parent crazy on a rainy day, so too, your chickens will need distractions when stuck indoors. A kitty litter box half-filled with sand and some food-grade

will give them something to do.

 

Greens tucked into a

 will also keep the chickens out of trouble.

 

And, of course, you can always set up a rousing game of cabbage tetherball.

 

It doesn’t take much to engage your chickens in activities that will keep everyone happy – including you, because, really, being a spectator to the antics is part of the fun.

Today’s Boston Globe has an article about the project that I’ve been involved with at the nursing home. You can read it here. Nancy West, the reporter, did a lovely job explaining what we’re trying to accomplish, and the photographer took some evocative photographs. Don’t miss the one of Beulah, the pullet, meeting a 101 year old woman.

Please share the article. Nursing homes are businesses, and change will come when they see that these projects have tangible benefits.

Protecting chickens from predators is an on-going concern. Hungry animals come across the lawn, they dig under fences, and they fly into pens. I know of no fenced run that is predator proof; a weasel can squeeze through a two-inch gap between the fence and a door. A fisher cat can rip off hawk netting. The danger is worse at night and I believe that you should close up your hens as soon as they’ve gone in to roost. Pop doors need to be secured from the inside because a raccoon is capable of prying open a latch.

The danger of a predator attack begins at sundown, but as much as I want to shut up the barns right at sundown, I’m not always home, and I’m not willing to have my schedule be totally dictated by the animals in my backyard. LIke many things in life, I balance my needs against the risks.  An automatic door closer can help. These electronic doors open and close at sunrise and sunset, and are either on timers or are light sensitive. I know of plenty of people who rely on them.

However, in all my years of keeping chickens, I’ve never used an automatic coop door closer. For the first 8 years I didn’t have electricity in the henhouse. Now that I do, I also have goats and a rabbit and dogs, all of which all need attention and require my presence. I’m always home within a few hours of sundown, if not, I have someone stop in to check on the animals. Also, Candy, having a wicked sense of bunny humor, used to sit on the pop door ledge and block the hens from going in at night. I worried that if I did use an automatic door, that the girls would have been stuck outside. Also, a rabbit needs to be secured safely in her own hutch – not something an automatic pop door can do!

Despite not having automatic doors here, when I thought through how to protect the hens at the nursing home, I knew that an automatic door was a necessity for that flock. Although the coop run has hardware cloth all around, there are gaps near the door into the run that wouldn’t provide nighttime protection.

Also, staffing changes daily, as does the time that the coop needs to be secured at night, and opened in the morning. An automatic door solved that scheduling issue.The coop was purchased prewired for electricity, and an automatic chicken door was installed.

Chickendoors.com is the manufacturer of this automatic chicken door.

It has several nice features. If the power goes out, it will run on reserve battery power. It’s made in the USA by some really fine people. You can chose to have either a timer or a light-sensitve opener.

You can select a right or left opening door. I ordered the wrong one, which will be replaced, so that the view of the chicken ramp isn’t blocked.

There are plenty of other options out there. Some doors slide up. There are YouTube videos about how to build your own. Let me know if you have experience with an automatic pop door. Now if only I could figure out how to close the rabbit up at night… and the goats…

We are heading into the sweltering days of summer and I cannot over-emphasize how essential it is to keep a close eye on your hens. Heat can be deadly to your flock. Chickens die from heatstroke and they die from dehydration. Even if the heat isn’t lethal, you might notice them eating less and laying fewer eggs.

I’ve written about how to help your chickens cope with heat here. Today I literally pulled another bag out of my collection of tricks. Green beans are one of the few veggies that everyone in my family eats and so every year I plant a large row of green beans in the garden. But, every year I harvest far more than we can consume fresh. I freeze the excess into bags. When I can’t keep up with the abundance, and the beans get big and tough, I share them with the goats (watch them scarf them down and burp on this video.)

 

I confess to not really liking beans that have been frozen, even when vacuum-packed. Still, every summer I freeze them in hopes that this will be the year that I find the perfect use for them over the winter. I never do, and I always have a few bags left over from the previous year’s harvest, but they don’t go to waste. On scorching hot days I offer these frozen blocks to the hens.

The pullets have never seen such a thing before, but they investigate and start pecking. (Note that I have put an extra waterer in the shade, which is the best thing that you can do for your chickens when it gets hot.)

 

The Gems know all about these frozen treats and attack the block with enthusiasm. Despite the lethargy that comes on during a heat wave, these green beans will get them to cool off a bit from the frozen bits they’re swallowing, and provide more water and greens to their diet.

Better yet, the green beans, which I put effort and energy into processing and freezing, won’t go to waste. Win-win all around.

The pullets are too young to lay, and yet there is an egg in the nesting box. Could it be that I have an Easter Bunny in training?

 

No, there’s magic of another sort in the Little Barn. Twinkydink is laying eggs!

She’s eight years old, and has let everyone know that is is quite an effort to make eggs at her age. After she lays, she eats, and woe to any pullet who comes into the coop for a snack, as she will be roundly run off.

 

But not the bunny. Phoebe is allowed to stay in the coop. She and Twinkydink have come to an agreement. I’ve watched the negotiations from afar, but haven’t been privy to the conversation. Diplomacy is best done in private.