Our Chooks

We have been keeping chickens at our property since 2006 and I think that chickens are the best and easiest way to introduce anyone to modest self sufficiency. They are great. Food goes in and eggs and compost comes out.
Our first foray into the lives of chook owners was a pair of Old English Game hens, Cleopatra and Boudicca (left). These were very flighty birds who didn’t like us much. Also they weren’t very good layers.

We added four Isa Brown hens to the chook pen and started getting eggs! Woohoo!
The Isa’s were great, except that they were not very robust. I’ve since learned that the main reason that my Isa Browns were not very long lived was that they were “rescued” from a poultry farm where they were given lots of medications to keep them free from disease while they were kept in batteries. This means that when the chickens were liberated, they were more susceptible to diseases because they had never developed a natural immunity to them.
Our Isa Browns laid very large eggs (on average the eggs were 70-90 grams) and we got five eggs every two days.
Cleopatra started to get very broody and would sit on the Isa eggs and not leave the nesting box to eat or drink. To solve this, I attached a food and water dish to the nesting box that she used and made sure that she left the nest at least once a day.
We decided that it was time to get rid of the OEG hens. Our neighbour took Cleopatra to use as a broody hen for his chickens (none of which were broody at all) and Boudicca would be re-homed to the kitchen.
I was quite reluctant to kill and clean a chicken, but I figured that if I was going to keep chickens, then I had to accept that some of these animals were going to end up on my table, and that I would be the one who would have to do it. If I learned how to do this properly, then there was little risk that either I or the chicken in question would suffer.
Suffice to say, that I believe that I can now dispatch a chicken and prepare it for the table without causing the chicken or the rest of the flock any distress.
Our Isa Browns were also very fond of the plum tree (you can see the plum tree in the picture to the right). When the plums were dropping from the tree, the chooks would eat as many as they could stuff into their crop. Unfortunately, these had a tendency to ferment in the birds’ crop. I had one embarrassing experience taking a chook to the vet only to have the vet tell me that the chook was drunk!
The Isa Browns didn’t live very long; unfortunately, they were all gone by the end of 2009. Now I have four White Leghorn hens and a Rhode Island Red rooster, Raj.
The White Leghorns are prolific layers and they seem to be very satisfied with their rooster. Raj is also very happy with the hens. We have produced one clutch of four chicks from the chickens as an experiment in incubation. The chicks from the first clutch are now happily living at a friends’ property in Collinsvale, Tasmania. Another seven eggs are currently in the incubator and are due to hatch this weekend!
To accommodate our growing brood of birds, I am converting a badly neglected outbuilding into a new chicken run for the hens and the old run will be a bachelor pad for the males. Raj will be the only breeding male so we won’t have to worry about testosterone driven fowl murder.
Read the article below about the conversion of the outbuilding.