Friday the 13th:  We know now that we’ve been losing chickens this week.  About 10.  About one a day, since about when the leaves fell.  We’ve seen the hawk several times.  This morning I got up early and when it was light walked out in the morning mist.  The weeds and branches were softer in the fine rain, and didn’t cling to me so much as yesterday.  I found three spots, as though visiting shrines on a pilgrimage, where a sad soft cloud of feathers on the ground marked a chicken loss.  The cobwebs dripped teardrops when I brushed them.  And the complicated interwoven circle of life goes on.

We sold out of eggs in record time at yesterday’s market. We are so grateful to our clients - who are so happy with the eggs that you come back early and devotedly. We regret having to tell anyone we’ve sold out…. and yet, it is reminding us to consider that it is okay to be “just” a tiny producer.

We think this world would be a healthier place with lots more tiny producers. A small flock of chickens remains naturally healthier with lots of room to move around, with caregivers who know and recognize each one of them individually, with access to good wild food to eat. But there are limitations that come with being a tiny producer…. namely, accepting the ebbs and flows of nature, of normal chicken behaviour, of the effects of declining light, and the realities of the first-come, first-serve, early-bird-gets-the-worm policy! :)

And reality it is. In a sustainable world, there is not an unquestionable endless supply of boxed eggs like at the box store. Sometimes they are there, sometimes they are not. It is part of the lifestyle, the nature of living close to the earth, to celebrate gifts when they are abundant, and accept the seasonality of all things, including the egg.

One of the exciting reasons we have a few fewer eggs is that some of our hens became “setty” this summer, and wanted to stop laying, and brood eggs instead. When possible, we saved eggs with the most desirable qualities from the flock for a couple days and gave them to the broody hen. Three weeks later, this is the lovely result, if all goes well:

five tiny fluffy new home-hatched additions to the flock!

We’ve meant to post for awhile about the eggs this summer. The chickens roam through a wooded area all day, eating whatever they find that looks good to them. Eggyolks tend to reflect the chickens’ diets - the yellower they are, the more stuff they are finding to eat containing carotenoids (such as beta carotene).

For awhile, the chickens had found something to eat that was making their yolks astonishingly orange. Not even yellow anymore, but really orange. We think it was probably most likely some red and orange honeysuckle berries. Wild birds love those too. Some chickens tend to forage more than others, which might account for the differences between eggs in the same flock. The eggs in this picture are quite toned down compared to some we were getting for awhile. But they still bear a striking resemblance to the gorgeous delicious “Sunsugar” cherry tomatoes that are coming in finally….

Here are a couple pictures of the eggs at the height of their colorfulness, a couple weeks ago. First, a favorite recipe - homegrown tomato sauce warmed to simmering in a pan, then a few eggs dropped into it to poach. Heavenly spread on crunchy toast, with fresh basil.

And, just regular fried eggs, cooked in cast iron. Lots of range of colors to the yolks. If you’ve ever wondered why “yellow cake” was called yellow cake, this is it! The yellow that we’re all drawn to is supposed to come from healthy eggyolks, not red and yellow dye!

This entry starts with a story, and a warning about the story: If you are grossed out by discussions of animals consuming each other, look away!

One very cold day recently, in a break between snows, we cut and hauled firewood. The large chunks went to the garden, where there is a chopping block for splitting firewood. It is nearby to the compost pile, which is currently a 3 foot pile of frozenness. As I unloaded and stacked wood sections, I heard a rodent squeaking somewhere behind me. Not among the wood pile - farther away. When I realized it was a continuous squeaking, I went searching, out of curiousity. The squeak/squawk was repeated, continuous, “Eeee, Eeeeee, Eeeeee…” and in the snow, easy to find. To my amazement, there was a mole frozen into the compost pile.

Elvis is a very serious fellow

The mole was in a little burrow just slightly larger than his body, but the burrow had apparently frozen solid around him, and perhaps the expanding ice had shrunken it. His snout and front feet stuck out the exit hole, about 2 feet above the ground, and he was wiggling and squawking, trying to get out. He could not back up, it seemed he was in more of a blind pocket than a tunnel.

Now the chickens had caught sight of me moving around in the garden, and came to investigate. They cocked their heads for just a moment when they heard the squeaking, then one instant later were on top of the compost pile. Two hens discovered the mole immediately and went to work trying to drag him out of his hole. This caught Elvis the Rooster’s attention, and in a flash he was on the compost pile efficiently putting the mole out of his misery and dragging him out of his icy chamber.

In the time it took me to try to decide whether to intervene and save the mole or not, it was over. If it hadn’t been for the chickens, I would have helped the mole. But the mole was likely destined for slow death by freezing if I tried to free him into an environment he could not negotiate. Moles live underground. In fact, moles wreak havoc tunneling beneath the plants in the garden all summer long. The chickens provided a quick and logical solution to all angles of the story. And the mole…provided a protein supplement to the chickens.

That’s right - they ate him. They linked right into that food chain, and the mole that had lived off of our food in the garden fed the chickens that will turn around and feed us with their eggs. Chickens are little dinosaurs. Little fierce dragonlike beings, who (contrary to bucolic fantasy about merely pecking at grain gracefully) will go on rampages and absolutely ravage anything that looks remotely like a food source.

In the wintertime, the ranging chickens’ scavenged foods are cut back severely. We have a stockpile of squashes and vegetable material that is their usual, more vegetarian, source of alternate nutrients. Hopefully the beta carotene in the squash will help keep the nutrient levels in the eggs up a bit for the winter. The hens love to peck out the rind of a squash…. and I’m putting the orange squash picture next to the picture of the bright yellow beaten eggs ready to complete a fritatta, to illustrate the relationship. Colorful foods are good for all of us!

fritatta with brussels sprouts and blue potatoes

trombetta squash snack

So, let’s talk about chickens and cold weather and egg production. Recent comments on a friend’s blog (The Farmer’s Marketer) suggest that people who don’t have chickens of their own have a lot of questions about chickens. In particular, there are a lot of questions about raising happy healthy chickens and how their egg production changes with the seasons. I’m no expert on this… have only been raising happy chickens for 18 months now, but I can tell you what our experience is so far.

Today is cold out… only 8 deg F this morning. Tippy the cat and I went out to feed and water our hens this morning. Well, I went out to do that, and Tippy rode my shoulder the way he always does to protect me from misstep and keep my cheek warm. The West Flock out back in the new coop was happy to see us, ready for unfrozen water and some cracked corn. We toss out a couple cups of cracked grains every morning for them, which they go after like kids after pinata candy. Thus occupied, I refilled their regular grain feeder and gave them a gallon of drinking water without them under foot. The West Flock arrived as new chicks in May, and only a dozen or two came into laying before the winter came on in earnest, but they give us about 8-10 eggs per day. This morning their were nine waiting for us, and there will probably be a few more this afternoon. They have four wooden nesting boxes in the coop with straw in the bottom, and they left five eggs in one box and four in another — typically, they take turns using one or two favored nest boxes instead of spreading out and putting two eggs in each box.

Until this heavy snow hit (9″ on the ground now), we’ve been letting them out every day to try and forage… currently we open the door and they show no interest whatsoever in going out, so they’re staying in. Most days we give them a couple pounds of kitchen greens or squash that we’ve saved over from the summer, in supplement to their regular layer feed. And they go out and scratch around looking for whatever they might find.

Now where the West Flock is all youngsters (save one year-old Barred Rock, “Mike”), the East Flock saw winter last year as chicks, came into laying last spring and all summer and fall produced about 20 or so eggs a day (from 24 hens). In November they all started losing their feathers and molting… it looked like they lost weight and got all scruffy looking. Along with the feathers dropping, so did the egg production. We went from as many as two dozen a day to roughly 3-5 eggs a day from these hens, an 80% fall in production. Fortunately though, this happened just as the West Flock ladies were starting to lay, so overall production hasn’t dropped horribly (just by half).

From what we understand, the molting and egg production drop comes to most flocks right at this time, as the length of the days shortens and temperatures plummet. Many (most? all?) factory egg farms and a number of smaller farms try to minimize this production drop by using electric lights and timers to artificially lengthen the apparent day and fool the chickens into producing eggs “normally” thoughout the year, or at least with a shortened winter slow season. We’re not doing that here. We’ll consider giving them a little light in the early evenings (heck it would help keep the coop a little warmer) but we’re not going to try and engineer their laying patterns significantly. At Dragonwood we simply like chickens; they’re “working pets” for us more than anything else. So we decide what to do for the chickens based on what seems best for them, and most manageable for us.

Tippy and I had a nice walk in the blowing snow… not snowing but the wind is gusting strongly enough to fill in my footprints during the 15 minutes it took to trudge over to the East Flock and come back. So today as of 10am we got 9 eggs from the West Flock youngsters and 1 egg from the East Flock veterans. We’ll go back out to visit them in a while, freshen the water against the cold and collect any eggs to keep them from freezing and cracking before we can get them inside the house. It’s now too cold outside to use the refrigerator in the garage… everything just freezes in there at this time of year. We need a fridge with a heater inside to keep it from freezing! But such is life.

Oh, and the East Flock chickens are starting to get their feathers back. We’ll add some pictures soon I hope, but a few of the Black Stars (in particular) and one or two of the Barred Rocks are getting their feathers grown back in and are looking glossy again. Crazy time to shed your insulation, it seems to me! But we’re glad to see them coming back.

Update 3:30pm: We took out squash and tomatoes for both flocks, and got another 3 eggs from the East Flock veterans, for 13 total today… not expecting any more. A good day. Spread out a new bale of straw for the West Flock kiddies too.

In their first months of laying, our chickens seem to produce a higher number of double-yolked eggs. They’re really huge. When one of us comes in with one, we joke that “A goose got into the laying boxes again…”

Here’s our latest double-yolker. It’s shown in comparison to average large eggs. Double-yolked eggs are pretty interesting. They’re twins, in one shell. They sometimes look like two ordinary eggs coming out of the shell when you crack the egg… or sometimes the two yolks are smaller and nearly fused together. They are just as perfectly edible as any other egg, in fact, we remember reading a piece in Martha Stewart Living magazine about eggs, that said something about the luxury of ordering a double-yolker over-easy in a New York diner. You might find a double-yolker in the eggs you get from us on rare occasion. Many times they are too big to fit into the egg cartons, though, and go into our breakfasts instead!

Huge double-yolked eggs inspire awe for the experience of the chicken, though we’ve never seen any difficulty or any out-of-the-ordinary caffuffel over the process of passing such eggs. In fact, from a midwife’s standpoint, it’s fairly reaffirming of our philosophy - there’s quite a range of normal, and even the big ones can come out naturally!

If you’re into reading more about unusual egg formations, this site has some pretty interesting pictures, including eggs with tails! http://www.poultryhelp.com/oddeggs.html

We had a chicken scare this morning. At dawn, (which was barely dawn because it was so drab grey) a chicken began cackling underneath the bedroom window. Only one lone chicken, cackling in an upset “I’m all alone!” sort of way. It yanked us out of sound sleep, and I lay there for just a moment thinking about it, then realized noone has let them out yet, she shouldn’t be there…

In the world of chickens, this can be a harbinger of disaster. We have a few final details we haven’t finished on the coop, loopholes that a crafty raccoon could manage to navigate looking for a midnight snack. In a chicken armageddon of past years, I lost about 15 chickens in one night of raccoon attack. At that time, it was nearly all of my flock, and I gave the survivors away and gave up chicken raising for a while.

Last night, I was pretty tired. I went to a birth the night before, returned at 3 am, woke at 9 am and was out of the house as quick as possible to go to a building tear-down event. Worked all day pounding and carrying and lifting, and hauling salvaged wood, then finally got home after dark and shut the chickens up quickly for the night without bothering with a flashlight. So this morning, I was certain I had left something open for the raccoons, and the lone chicken under the window was giving the alert call for havoc.

So we leaped out of bed and pulled on overalls and boots and ran out to the coop. Thirty-some sleepy and content chickens eyed us, completely enclosed with no breaches in the armor of the coop. Whew. And of course, the loose chicken was a Delaware. The breed that has proven to be inquisitive lets-see-where-this-dark-passageway-leads curious types. She must have hidden and camped out for the night rather than going into the coop with the others. False alarm! We are thankful for that.

My coffee is down to the bottom of the cup here on a Saturday morning sitting next to the woodstove, because it’s cold and rainy threatening snowy outside. The chickens went outside as long as I sprinkled some cracked grains for them, but the seem mostly huddly now, eitther under the porch overhang, the densest lilacs or back in the chicken palace (this is the West Flock I’m talking about; I can’t see the East Flock from here).

I took a couple pictures of the new West Flock chicken palace on my iPhone, and here’s the best of them.

Tis a cute thing, about 7′x17′ inside, dirt floor, nesting boxes on one side, food and water in the middle, 8″ beam roosts on the huddly side. The sides are old barn siding, shingled down like lapstrake sides on an old wooden boat. The windows and door are all recycled too. The ladies and gents all like it now, took a couple days to get used to it, but they all head in there to roost ahead of closing time nowadays and nobody tries to roost for the night in the trees or on the fences anymore. Of course, it’s also colder now, so there’s good reason to want to huddle/cuddle.

We have a chicken coop! We finished the essential parts of it just as it started to really snow for the first time.

Previous to this, forty chickens were housed in a “summerhouse” lean-to shack, with 3 open sides. They roamed the property all day, and merely returned to the shack for nighttime roosting. It was serviceable for this in warm weather, but in no way meant for wind and cold or flying precipitation.

posts up

Last week the weather held marvelously, and we worked in shirt sleeves getting the new chicken house up, with 70 degree weather. The weather turned at the end of the week, when we had 3 & 1/3 walls up. The last wall portion took two days, involving the framing for the small chicken door, and two large windows. Those last two days were cold, wet, gloomy, working between bouts of rain and sleet, and trips indoors to shiver with a cup of tea beside the woodstove, then force ourselves back outside again.

Hammering a cold finger is exquisitely painful. Like when your hands are cold and you bump a finger hard against the counter or tabletop, but about fifty times more intense. For a heartbeat, it’s just kindof numb, and you think it won’t be so bad, then suddenly pain takes over in waves. There’s nothing to do but stand there and hold the finger, and yell or swear for a couple minutes. You figure it’ll be black and blue under the fingernail, for how badly it hurts, but a half hour later it’s mostly fine. It’s just the cold accentuating the whack.

framing rafters and walls, under the golden maple leaves

I had been referring to my copy of “Country Women” by Jeanne Tetrault and Sherry Thomas, for some basic building tips. I love how that book is written for women, and un-condescendingly for the inexperienced. As I was building, I felt such an affinity for the things she said about ego, and men and women, and work. About gender roles and building, about how women hold things, while men cut and nail them. It was a kind of therapy for me to have one day by myself, building alone. I grew up in a rather girls-play-with-dolls, boys-play-with-tools sort of family. So when I taught myself to use a power saw all by myself while working on the coop, it was a revelation.

two walls up

It was totally empowering to frame the door and a window, put them in, and put the wall up around it. It was a combination of the basic human delight in knowing you are able to create shelter where there was nothing, plus the dawning of a realization that perhaps I wasn’t as unskilled as I have thought myself to be for so long.

The coop isn’t perfect… it’s a crazy mishmash of odd angles and cobbled together bits. It doesn’t need to be perfect, we discovered. Much of it is reclaimed barn wood from a disintegrating barn. A lot of the siding looked suspect, like it would just fall apart with hammering on it, but with rotten ends trimmed off, most was surprisingly strong and solid, in its delapidation. A couple old cedar boards gave me a hard time with cutting and hammering, and they gave off the most incredible fresh cedar scent, even though they haven’t been part of a living tree for about 120 years. When I looked at the newly cut edges, I could see the hard crystallized sap that looked like a streak of amber running through the wood. No wonder so many of my nails turned on that one.

salvaged door installed, siding and windows going up