The Natural Life - Chapter 8 - Chickens

The best bird in the business.

Hello Frens,

Welcome back to The Natural Life, we wrapped up tools, and I told you last week we would talk about chickens today so here we are. A few of you have bought BAZ BARS and I would like to personally thank you. It’s great smelling all natural soap, I use it every day, we have not bought commercial soap in over 3 years. Any support we receive from the store helps to feed these guys in one way or another. Let me know if you have any feedback on the store or product, your thoughts are important to us anon! Also, keep an eye out for new products, we should have some honey and other tasty goods coming soon.

So you want to hear about small feathered dinosaurs… I mean chickens…? Well you’ve come to the right place. We have had chickens for about 5 years now, and I can’t imagine not having these birds walking around our place. There really is something about just watching a flock of chickens wander through your yard, it’s relaxing, almost like watching an aquarium of fish swimming around.

There’s also the joy that comes with looking out your window and seeing a chicken or two sprinting across the yard for no apparent reason. Or seeing your rooster run across the yard at an all out sprint so that he can jump on the back of a hen and do the jungle boogie… lol!!

The basics: Chickens need a place to go at night to get off of the ground to sleep, or rest, or whatever they do at night. They need food and water obviously. And they need protection. Protection comes in many forms so we’ll get to that later. For food, we simply buy a “layer pellet” that can be found at any animal feed store, we throw out a few cups of this on the ground each morning to supplement their diet with whatever they eat throughout the day “free ranging”.

Chickens walk around all day scanning the ground, scratching and looking for bugs, seeds, leaves, and anything else to eat. Chickens will eat just about anything. It’s worth noting here that if you are one of those who like to have perfectly manicured flower beds, you may want to keep your chickens locked up. They will absolutely destroy a flower bed scratching around looking for bugs and worms, so consider yourself warned. We throw all of our food scraps in a wooden bin out by the chicken house and throughout the day you will see chickens, dogs, and cats hopping in and out of the bin pecking around in there for food.

If you are not able to allow your birds to free range, you will need a more robust feeding system. I would recommend getting a large feeder with a hook so you can hang them off of the ground. This keeps them from getting knocked over, it also keeps birds from perching on top of the feeder and pooping all over it. My set up looks like this, I’ll admit, I only put these feeders out when we leave out of town for a few days. I will fill these two feeders up and keep all of the chickens locked inside of this house/chicken run.

Our setup has evolved even more since this setup, I’ll tell you about it later.

The next thing chickens need is water. You will want to use feeders/waterers like this… if you have chicks around because they can drown in a deeper bucket of water. The red water container in the picture above and below, will drown a small chick, don’t use these when you have small chicks please. When they grown a little older you can transition to a shallow water bucket like the one above in the picture.

I have evolved even more by getting these automatic waters that go on the side of any bucket. This allows you to leave the birds and know they have water, but you still want to check on them and clean the water bowl out every few days.

Protecting your birds is probably the hardest part of owning chickens. The easiest way to keep your birds safe is to leave them in a “chicken run” which is an area completely closed off with wire or netting so that no predators can come in to get your birds. Some issues you will run into with this set up is the birds will start to make a big mess on the ground in the chicken run, so it’s good to have a chicken coop that you can move around, sometimes called a chicken tractor. It lets you more the chickens to fresh grass periodically so they have a clean place to walk.

If you don’t have a moveable chicken coup, or if you have a large established coop. you will have to clean it regularly. We put hay down on the ground inside the coop and rake it all out about once a month. There are wood chips that the pet stores sell, this stuff is really nice, but it costs money. I have unlimited access to hay, so we use it in the coops. This is really the easiest method for us and I know there are many different chicken coop maintenance methods.

Chickens need a comfortable place to lay eggs. If they don’t feel comfortable in the laying boxes, they will start laying eggs all over the place, in your garage, in the woods, anywhere. Any coop you buy from a store will have 3 or more nesting boxes built in which will get you started. If you decide to build your own coop or upgrade, let me know and I can help you with plans. If there is a request for more information on building coops i’ll do a substack on it.

We have always allowed our chickens to free range, they learn their place and come home every evening at dark, it’s amazing. Every night we would go out there and close the door to their coop so that nothing would come and get them. Its very important to keep them locked up at night, because its when they are most vulnerable. Now we don’t even close the door because we have a big sugar bear sleeping right out side of the coop every night!

We have always had dogs around, but they are “inside” dogs that sleep inside at night. So during the day these dogs will deter most small predators, but the predators soon learn that the dogs aren’t around at night and they will come in and get your birds. There are two solutions to this problem, trapping the predators, or getting an outside dog. Trapping is not as hard as you would think, it involves setting traps to catch the small animals that are getting your birds, it’s usually a opossum, raccoon, or fox. On rare occasions hawks will come in and take your chicken off, and coyotes are obviously a culprit, but they are not likely to come too close to your house. I would keep the chicken coop no more than 50-100 yards from your house so that predators will not easily get your chickens.

We have a Great Pyrenees that has learned to stay close by the farm and not run off. She is very protective of all of the animals, and spent a year in the pen with our goats. She finally started getting out of the pen and we decided just to let her roam free. This works out great now for us because she practically sleeps in the chicken house, so I’m 100% confident there will be no raccoons coming close to my chickens. Most people will not be able to do this, so trapping will be their only option.

If I were to try to trap a raccoon or opossum, I would start out with a live trap since it is the most humane way of trapping an animal. You can buy these here, and you would place it in a spot near your coop near the woods where you think the predator is coming from. Put a can of tuna or some type of potted meat in there. I would get some rope or wire and tie the trap to a tree or small sapling, I have had these disappear somehow, I kid you not. Usually in a couple days you will have you a possum or raccoon, where you can simply take to another location and release. This is my wife’s hand, not my hand in the picture below, lol!

I recommend setting the trap constantly, always have the trap set, there could be a family of 10 raccoons in your area that you will need to get out of there.

If this live trap does not work, your next option will be what is called a dog proof trap. These are very easy to set, here is a youtube video showing you how to trap coons, this guy is the best I’ve seen…

That’s all I’ve got for now and I didn’t even really talk that much about chickens! So much to cover, maybe next time. I’ll holler at yall later.

Your Fren,

BowTied Farmer

WAGMIT