Despite industrial agriculture’s co-opting and subsequent diminishing of the descriptor “free range”, it is rewarding to be able to describe our chickens as such and mean it.  They aren’t limited to a euphemistic “access to the outdoors” — typically a meager chicken run meeting the minimum USDA standard and meant to dupe consumers.  Our pullets can roam where they choose in our yard, eat what they like, and defend themselves (or not) as needed from the wild animals that share their space.

They can be chickens, every day.

So far, they use their new-found liberty to scratch and peck from morning to evening in an unrelenting march about the yard.  They are particularly fond of the compost piles, perhaps having longed for these stacks of edible refuse that sat just out of reach for as long as they can remember.  They spend half their time there, as I’d hoped, fertilizing and turning the piles in exchange for the bugs and scraps they get to eat.

Bailey (Rhode Island Red), Seven (Barred Rock), and Justin (Buff Orpington) cruise together, with Kate (Dominique) almost always on her own.  It’s not clear by whose design this is, but I find it hard to believe either party would exclude the other as a result of Kate being added to the flock a week after the others.  She is also one week younger.  But the disconnect is hard to disregard.  At least they get along like acquaintances, if not sisters.

In exploring the yard, they’ll peck anything once: grass, sandal, flower, cement.  They don’t seem opposed to eating the spiny, mature growth on our squash plants, unfortunately, so they’ll have to be kept away from most of the vegetables, even if they do ultimately turn havoc in the garden into eggs.  Their powerful scratching — the yard at the end of the first day of ranging looked like it had been hit by a hundred tiny tornadoes — also poses a problem for delicate or shallow-rooted plants, as many edibles are.

However, we could hardly confine them any longer.  Though our coop is sized with the requisite four square feet of floor space and 10 inches of roost per bird, we would have built it bigger if our intent was to always keep them in.  As it was clear when they needed to move from the brooder to the coop at six weeks, it was clear they needed to range at 20.  They’re big, and they look bigger, more real for some reason as they trot, scratch, and peck across our view out the back door, and add their clucks to our morning breakfast — providing a novel, yet natural backdrop to our every day.

I had originally intended to wait a few more days before transferring the chicks to the coop, but the weather’s been warm — and I just couldn’t take any more attitude.  Those little birds have been wearing me down.

Over the past week the chicks have gone wild, turning from adorable little tufts of fuzz to brooder ransacking hooligans.  They began dumping their feeder a half dozen times a day, or packing it with bedding, or burying it at the bottom of the brooder under several inches of wood shavings.  In all cases, food was wasted at a fast pace and hungry, expectant peeping ensued.  They also began kicking bedding into their water bowl so thoroughly that it would absorb, thicken, and block their access to needed fluids.  Their kicking and digging and scratching had become an unyielding cacophony at all hours, an activity that flung bedding across the garage and stirred plumes of pulverized dust and food into the air to settle on all surfaces.  And they’d begun to smell, no matter how often their cage was tidied.

If our relationship was to have any hope of a rosy future, one of us had to move out.

At five weeks old, they’re at the right age to be transferred to an outdoor coop.  At this point, all but Kate are fully feathered (she’s a few days younger) — and they’re all strong, with tough claws and sharp beaks.  As the weather has warmed, I have barely used the heat lamp.  They’re ready.

This past week I gave the coop a smell test, of sorts, by placing wet and dry cat food in the coop in the evenings to attract varmints and test their mettle.  Nothing got in, but nothing big really tried.  Some animal attempted to dig in around the edges in several places, but stopped at the buried bougainvillea in each case.

Hopefully the coop is secure.

Either way, the chicks are out there.  Their initial explorations were hesitant and en masse, but eventually they discovered their water, food, and independence, and with some prompting surveyed the inner coop and nest boxes. Late their first night (just moments ago), I found them huddled under the lamp, sleeping comfortably.

We have a coop with chickens in it — in our yard.  How about that.

I noticed that several of the new sprouts — Kentucky Wonder, Contender, and Scarlet Emperor — had wilted and looked chewed.  A few had pill bugs on their tender new leaves, but all had dozens of these tiny crustaceans just beneath the surface of the soil, devouring the seed from which the plant had sprung, as well as the young roots.

Pill bugs are a type of woodlouse, a bug I’ve always regarded as kind of harmless.  Typically they come out at night to feed on dead plants, which benefits soil fertility, but apparently they can be a pest in cultivated environments.  They breath through gills, and so require moisture, which I have been providing regularly to germinate the bean seeds.  The combination of a wet environment and new growth drew the pill bugs out of the nearby leaf litter where they typically dwell.

At least half the beans are a loss, but will be easily replanted — a benefit of having started the warm-season crop early this year.  However, starting over sets up the same conditions that caused the problem in the first place.

There are, of course, dozens of chemical options with which I could firebomb the entire planter, but that’s not really the way we roll.  Sprinkling the bugs and the area around the new plants with diatomaceous earth is a greener option.  D.E. is simply crustacean and algal fossils that have been deposited in marine layers, crushed and pulverized for millions of years, and then mined as a fine powder (I suppose the mining’s not really green).  When used as a pesticide, D.E. slips between the segments in a hard-shelled animal’s exoskeleton and has a desiccating effect — in other words, it dehydrates the animal to death.

However, karma-wise, that sets me up for, what, an Australopithecus bone bludgeoning?

I ended up going with a solution that accomplishes two goals: reduce the population of pill bugs to the point where it no longer poses a threat to my bean sprouts (hopefully) and put the dead to good use.  I guess third goal that my solution satisfies would be gardening without inputs.

I picked the 50-or-so woodlice from my plants and fed them to the chicks.  I wanted to see how they would react to their first non-feed food.  And you know, it doesn’t really take a biologist, or an experiment, to know that a bird will eat a bug.

They did.  And they were damn happy with their handfuls of hand-picked terrestrial crustaceans.

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.

Yesterday the farm-ish-ness of our suburban fifth acre took a big leap forward: Our shipment of baby chicks arrived.  Our first farm staple.  We ordered them in February from an online vendor, My Pet Chicken, that had an informative site and wide variety of breeds — despite the superficial name.  The main criteria for selecting this hatchery ended up being its minimum order of three, whereas nearly every other seller and shipper of chicks required a purchase in the range of 10-to-25.  While we’re zoned for up to 25 chickens, we were thinking more like three or four.

We ordered four, a small number that ended up bearing out the contention of most hatcheries that day-old chicks need the heat of 10-to-25 little bodies to survive shipping.  One of our chicks didn’t make it, the Australorp, which was a surprisingly wrenching discovery.  They’re damn effective at being damn cute.  I think this reaction all but rules out raising chickens for meat.  We buried the Australorp in the garden where the Sun Flowers will grow.

The chicks arrived yesterday morning while I was teaching a class, delivered by our fantastic mailman, Gregg, who brought them by before tackling his route so they wouldn’t have to sit in his truck.  Sarah expertly, if worriedly, handled introducing the sluggish, road-worn chicks to their brooder, dipping their beaks in water so they’d know where to drink (they arrive more than parched) and setting them on the bedding.  I had read a recommendation just a day or so before that the wood-chip bedding be covered with nubby paper towels sprinkled with feed for the first few days to encourage the chicks to peck and eat food rather than wood chips.  We went with that, and it seems to be working.

Sarah said they arrived looking half-dead, wobbly, refusing to chirp, drink, or peck, but with a few quick Google searches she found these characteristics to be expected after such a traumatic first day of life.  Within a few hours the surviving chicks had perked up into a noisy threesome.  Now, I don’t want to call my pregnant wife broody, but she attended to these babies like a pro.  Chicks are shipped day-old because they can live off of their yolk fat for up to 48 hours.  They do need water and 95-degree heat, though, which are two necessities not included in transit.  The box they arrived in was just big enough to hold a pair of boots and insulated with a few inches of hay shaped into a rough nest.  A small heating pad, like a mini Icy Hot, sat at the center.

While I believe My Pet Chicken did everything they could to ensure the chicks arrived healthy and safe, after the loss of the Australorp and seeing the condition the others arrived in, we couldn’t justify ordering chicks online again.  It involves a little more pain and suffering than we’re willing to inflict on a one-day-old animal.  For those readers in San Diego, Kahoots Feed & Pet in Ramona has a good variety of chicks and everything you need to care for them, with a friendly and knowledgeable staff.  Ask for Kyle.  The next time we’re in the market for chicks, that’s where we’ll get them.

In addition to the Australorp, we ordered a Rhode Island Red, a Barred Rock, and a Buff Orpington.  They are all good layers, and relatively big birds when grown, which will hopefully give them some security when they’re old enough to roam the yard.  And we wanted to raise breeds other than those that dominate the industrial CAFO‘s, like the White Leghorn.  The single-breed dominance that has risen from commercial egg and meat production has threatened the existence of many traditional breeds.

Already, the chicks have distinguished themselves in their little brood.  The Red clearly dominates the others.  The Buff is the largest, puffy and noisy.  And then there’s the Rock.  The Rock seems to be a little runty and just a touch narcoleptic.  She has healthy behavior, like pecking and drinking and roaming.  But she also just stops, plops down, droops her head to floor, and nods off.  Rather suddenly.

That’s day one.  Twenty more weeks to eggs.