For weeks — even before our shipment of chicks arrived — I have been reading about the perils of being a chicken. And there are many. However, our brood will not face most of the horrors about which I have lately learned simply because of its size. As with any animal, high population density encourages health and social/behavioral problems. It’s true for people. It’s true for chickens.
So our chickens are unlikely to suffer from Marek’s Disease (though we got them vaccinated just in case), or any number of other ailments that chickens kept by the thousands in industrial feed houses suffer from and that necessitate their daily doses of medication. Our chickens are unlikely to cannibalize one another, or gang up on and peck a smaller chicken to death, or isolate a disliked chicken and prevent it from feeding until it starves to death — as happens with chickens that are not provided adequate personal space. It’s extremely unlikely that they will peck each other till they bleed out of boredom, as birds in featureless environments where they can’t range around and scratch for part of their meal tend to do.
However, one threat we cannot control is the behavior of other predators that like to eat chicken and eggs as much as we do. Absent an indiscriminate aerial bombardment of our neighborhood with pesticides and herbicides that would make Rachel Carson blanch, there will be predators and they will try to eat our chickens. The prime candidates in our area are hawks, skunks, opossums, raccoons, and coyotes (though I’m not convinced the latter can get into our yard).
Our chickens will range during the day when the hawks are out, and we have done what we can to give the chickens a fighting chance by ordering breeds that will blend in with our environment and that are fairly alert and self-sufficient. We are also growing flower beds and other cover that the birds can hide out in when something’s overhead.
The real threat will come at night according to the troubling anecdotes I’ve heard from local keepers and from the warnings I’ve read: raccoons that will pull a chicken’s leg through the chicken wire and bite it off, raccoons that can figure out latches and locks, opossums that dig their way into the coop to eat the abdomen out of a chicken and leave the rest, and skunks that tunnel in, too, and eat the heads.
Such tales have already had me modifying the coop. I offset a second layer of chicken wire around the entire structure to a height of two feet to prevent reaching in. I complicated the latches and locks (but I’ll probably test this measure out on my neighbor’s kid, because if a toddler can figure it out, a raccoon can). I buried layers of dried out, razor sharp bougainvillea stalks to eight inches deep around the coop borders. And I am planting defensively, installing thorny berry vines and pineapple plants along the exposed lengths of the hen house.
But will it be enough? There’s really no way to know until it’s not.
Because we’re not varmint exterminators, nor insect or weed eradicators, and because we try to live a more permaculturally-minded existence, we feel we also have to be realistic about our chickens and their survivability. We have always wanted three chickens. Two would be too few. And it seems like a distinct possibility that we’ll lose at least one to the success of some hunting animal that earned it.
So, long story long — we got ourselves another chick. We bought a week-or-so-old Dominique from Kahoots on Monday, so she’s about the same age as our brood. We were pleased to see the other birds signal their acceptance of the little Dominique by cleaning her off upon her arrival. Our birds have grown fast in the last two weeks, sprouting feathers almost immediately, making short flights at 10 days, roosting. They’re friendly with us at this point, and will sit in our hands or perch on our fingertips without trying to escape.
And they’ve all got names now, too: Bailey (Rhode Island Red, reddish), Justin (Buff Orpington, yellow), Seven (Barred Rock, black and yellow/white), and Kate (Dominique, smallish black).
We’d hate to lose any of them.
