BST and a new sort of freedom

Three cheers for British Summer Time!

It may not have got much above freezing yet, but the hour of extra sunlight in the evenings is still very much appreciated. It makes such a difference to the feel of the day to get home from work and have a few hours of sunlight still left to enjoy - even if I need a hat and scarf to do so!

For the hens this means a change of routine too. Giving them the freedom of the garden under close supervision at the weekends has given us the confidence to decide that we will do so more often. It gets them out of the mud bath that is their run and gives them access to greens, bugs, dry soil and a bit of space to run and flap.

We'd also noticed that the last few times we'd released them that they would happily wander back into the run to get to water, or to the nest boxes which convinced us that they were settled and that they knew where home was which makes the whole thing a lot easier.

So, from now on the plan is to let them out when we get home from work until they decide that it's bed time. We've done this each night this week and it's worked like a treat. We let them out at about six, they enjoy themselves greatly and then at about eight go back to their coop and settle down for the night. Bingo.

Checking out the odds I have corn hidden behind my camera...

Everyone enjoying preening in the late evening sun

A tale of two pests

Sorry for my absence last week: A relatively sunny bank holiday weekend seemed to take me away from my computer for the most part. A most pleasant experience. Did everyone else have a good long weekend?

I must admit though, I have a confession to make. Well, two confessions really. Deep breaths and here we go:

Confession number one
The first concerns last weeks worming. For a while now we've noticed that Fizzy has seemed a little under the weather. She seemed to be eating fine which is one thing to check, and she's never laid an egg which makes it hard to notice that she might have stopped laying, yet she stopped being her normal boisterous self. We'd assumed that this was because she'd slipped down a place or two in the pecking order. As each of the other hens has started to lay that seems to have given them a higher status, leaving poor Fizzy as a bit of an outsider.

However, a week after giving them wormer and she seems to have perked up again. She's still not really part of the group with the others but she's seeming a bit more full of life, and has started to tell us off again if we dare not give her a treat when we go out into the garden.

This is really good to see, but makes me feel bad that we hadn't spotted the problems earlier - and reminds me that at the end of the day we're still novices at this. We'll continue to keep an eye on her (and the others) to make sure that she doesn't pick them up again - and maybe she'll start laying soon if she's feeling better.

Confession number two
We were spending some time with them on Saturday and noticed that Pepper was looking a bit scragglier than normal. Digging around under her wings into the softer downier feathers I spotted a louse scurrying for cover. I only ever saw the one no matter how hard I looked, so we're hoping this isn't a bad infestation, but we gave all four hens a hefty dose of lice powder and disinfected the coop. Again, this is going to be one to keep an eye on and make sure that we've sorted now.

I'll tell you one thing though - I'm so glad that we've make a point of learning how to handle our hens, and getting them used to regular handling. They certainly don't come to us voluntarily, but the process of catching each hen and administering the lice powder was so much simpler than it would have been six months ago. The hens stayed fairly calm, and the whole fiasco was done in a matter of minutes. Phew!

p.s. Sorry for the lack of photos for this one, we acted first and thought about photos second!

What's a worm do?

Its that time again. Lots of pets need regular worming and chickens are no different. In the case of our feathered friends, they need to be wormed every 6 months. We did them when we first got them, and time has flown.

We use Flubenvet. You can buy it at places like Countrywide and then its just a case of spiking their feed with it for a week or so. Since our enormous feeder holds over a weeks food for our flock anyway its a case of taking what we'd normally put in each weekend and adding the requisite amount of drug - in this case about a scoop. Simple.

What a palaver!

Our hens are very good at laying their eggs in the next boxes. Once they get the hang of egg laying they don't lay them anywhere else - which is great for us - it means we don't end up scrabbling around trying to work out where they've put them now.

There is one exception to this good news and that is when we need to clean out the coop. This weekend we were due a lot of rain, so I decided to take advantage of a couple of sunny hours on Saturday morning to get the coop all clean and tidy and ship shape ready for another week. We let the hens loose in the garden which is usually quite enough distraction and took apart the hen house.

The coop we bought is really useful as the floor of the main coop removes completely, as do the perches, but it means that once we start cleaning the nest boxes are inaccessible. Lemon decided that this was the moment that she needed to lay an egg. Now. When Pepper or Frog is in this position they tend to hover near the coop with their legs crossed until they can get inside again. Lemon is not this subtle about life. She made a racket and a half. Initially I ignored her, egg laying is not as quick as you'd think and I wanted to get the coop sorted before the rain came. But she kept squawking and squawking and squawking. In the end we quickly sorted the nest boxes and reassembled the not-yet-clean coop to allow her access.

To be fair to her, she did pop straight inside, was quiet, and came out again a couple of minutes later. But she hadn't laid an egg. A moment later she was back inside, and then back out again, and she still hadn't laid an egg. This went on for 20 minutes. In the end it took midwife Pepper to pop in and talk her through it. Finally I thought. Except that they didn't then come back out to enjoy the grass, but decided to both sit in the same nest box on top of the egg. I really hope that this isn't the early sign of a broody hen.

In the end I chucked the two of them out, collected the egg and finally got the rest of the coop clean. What a palaver!

Spring has sprung?

I always love this time of year. Not particularly because of the weather which can still be quite wintery, but because the amount of daylight we receive is getting noticeably larger by the day. At the lowest point of the year we get a sunrise at about 8.15 and sunset at 16.00. This means that I spend pretty much every hour of sunshine at the office - not very inspiring.

Fortunately, this doesn't last forever. We've now reached that lovely point where the sun gets up before I do, and still hasn't completely set when I get home in the evening. I could sing for joy!

This reawakens me to the fun we had trying to put the chickens to bed last summer (check out my day-in-the-life post to read all about it). Over the last few months I've nipped over to the chicken coop when I've got home from work to find the girls snuggled up in bed. This has made shutting the coop door a doddle.

However, this week I've got home and found that they've only just gone inside for the night, and are wide awake really. I went to shut the coop door on Monday and discovered a face peering back at me - Frog had decided to have a look at what I was doing. Not very helpful! On this occasion me checking the nest boxes for eggs was long enough for her to decide that she did want to go to sleep really and I was able to slide the door home. Soon we'll have to start sneaking up on the coop again so that they don't all come running out to see whats happening. Let the games begin!

Mash 'em up

About a month ago I regaled you with my thoughts on looking after our hens in frosty weather. I mentioned that one way to help them stay warm is to mix their food with hot water, and promised that once we had tried it I would come back and tell you all about it. Following that post the weather became increasingly mild, which rather put the idea on the back-burner for a while.

This week, however, all has changed. We had 6 inches of snow on Friday and another inch on Tuesday and the temperature hasn't been higher than 1C for many days. The time had come to put the plan into action.

First things first though - the fruit netting that we use as a roof to the run was bending dangerously under the weight of the snow and threatening to drag the whole run down with it (sorry, no pictures). We removed it. We'd have to take the risk for a few days, and hope that chickens wouldn't get out and foxes wouldn't get in (so far, so good).

Now we could get in and out, we mixed up some layers mash (a finely ground mix of chicken food for adult hens) with some hot water to make a porridge like mixture and popped it in an old bowl. They have tucked in with gusto, and have done so each morning. It has been a massive hit. Hurrah!

Unfortunately its been about the only thing they have enjoyed this week. The girls have not been impressed with all this cold weather. They've been tending to spend most of their time tucked up in the coop to keep warm and have avoided walking on snow if they can help it.
In contrast, we've been having great fun and turned a large portion of the snow in our garden into a snow chicken. I mean, why not?

How has everyone else been finding the snow? 

An icy day

Winter has definitely arrived in Wales. Some parts of the country have had snow - we haven't been that (un)lucky yet. We have had an abundance of frosty mornings though.

My understanding is that chickens aren't too bothered by temperatures around freezing. They'll live in areas that drop to -20 centigrade (certainly not something we have here). They'll happily huddle together at night for warmth and don't seem bothered by frozen ground in the day. There are just one or two little things that we have to be careful about while the weather is like this.

The main problem is that their water container has a tendency to freeze over. Some days this just means cracking the ring of ice around the bottom and flicking it out so that the fresh water from inside can flow out again. Other days the ice has been more widespread and has meant we've been bringing the whole thing in and sitting it under a warm tap in order to get it all back to normal again.

Another cold weather thing we've been thinking about is a change to their food. When topping up our supplies of pellets for the girls, we noticed they were on multi-buy with mash. As far as I know pellets and mash are exactly the same food - its just that one sort has been formed into pellets to make it easier to handle. You can treat them the same and feed either as dry food, but you can also mix the mash with water for a porridge-like consistency. Several other chicken bloggers have said they make up warm mash on particularly cold mornings and we thought that sounded like a good but potentially messy idea. As yet we haven't found time to give it a go though. Maybe as we're home more over the Christmas holidays we'll give it a try - I'll let you know how we get on.

A day in the life...

Our chickens have quickly adapted to a routine that makes them nice and easy to care for. An average day goes something like this:

7.30 Open up the coop
Our girls don't do lie ins. If we're a little later than this they start to get grumpy. As we open up the coop door all four come tumbling down the ramp, normally led by Fizzy, and charge across the run to see what the day holds.

They then have some breakfast and will take turns at the feeder and water dispenser before rummaging through the ground for additional treats. This also seems to be the best time of day to go berserk.   They prance and flap, jump and twist, chase each other a bit and generally lark around. Maybe I should try it one day.

The majority of the day
They seem to spend most of the day engaged in a few typical activities. To name but a few: scratching the earth looking for bugs, pecking at whatever they can find, sitting in the sun, rain, or whatever the heavens have in store for us that day, wallowing in dry dusty bits of earth, eating, drinking and flapping at each other. Its a hard life.

17.00 Corn time
We always try and spend time with them when we finish work (how long this lasts is probably weather dependant), and in an attempt to tame them we generally bribe them with handfuls of mixed corn which they go mad for. The consequence of this is whenever we're in sight they'll come running over to see what we're up to, whether we're heading their way or not - just in case there's some corn to be had!

18.30 Bed time
A little bit more scratching around and then its bed time. Once the day starts to turn a bit gloomy they all check the perimeter of the run for possible roosts and then hop into the coop and snuggle down for the night. How civilised!

18.35 More corn?
Once we've spotted that they've all gone to bed one of us will pop out to shut the coop door. Fizzy, in her infinite wisdom, hears us coming and is straight out of the coop again to see what we're up to and check if there is anything tasty on offer. Sometimes this is followed by a mass exodus and we suddenly have a run full of chickens again. Typical.

18.40 Bed time. Again. 
We go back inside, and a couple of minutes later they've all gone to bed. This time we creep out and successfully shut the coop door.

And that's about all there is to it. Simple!