The "Not-A-Hick's" Guide to Chickens: Part III

Now that your “baby chicks” are beginning to be able to flap around, refuse to stay in the cardboard box and have trashed your bathroom, it might be time to consider moving the chickens to a more appropriate out-of-doors enclosure.  Chickens are not house pets, and it is likely that you no longer need me to explain why.

Preparing for the move is important.  Throughout the course of your “baby chicks” short lives you will have begun (at the 3 to 4 week mark) to slowly reduce the heat available to them under the heat lamp, thus ensuring that by the time they are fully feathered they are used to living without it’s warm and faux-nurturing presence.  Fully, or mostly, feathered birds can manage their own internal temperatures, food consumption, etc.  By this stage of development your ‘adorable baby chicks’ will have also started behaving like little assholes to each other and the beginning of a life-long pecking order will have been established, with some birds on ‘top,’ happy, loved and in charge, and other birds on the bottom.  Unhappy, constantly under physical duress, and forever trying to be with the flock that doesn’t want them.    Do not feel sorry for the bottom chicken on this rung.  It doesn’t do anybody any good and that chicken is there for a good reason.  It may have been smaller as a chick, experienced an injury or just be the slow un-wanted one.  Either way, somebody has to hang out a the edges as an early warning system that a predator is nearby.

Chickens have approximately zero ability to engage in moral reasoning and although it applies to them to some extent, no appreciation for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  They certainly have no propensity to care for a creature that is smaller and weaker than they are.  In Chicken-Social-Strata, someone has to be that bottom rung.  No ifs ands or buts about it.  Chickens, like people, are generally only nice to other critters that can give them what they want.  If you don’t believe me, turn on the news.

As you prepare to move the birds outside remember that whatever enclosure you create for them it has to be sturdy enough to withstand the explorations of local predatory type animals.  Your chickens have just made your backyard the magnet for coyotes, raccoons, foxes, dogs and the neighbors big tomcat.  If you don’t believe that these sorts of animals exist in your neighborhood because you live in the “city” just leave your chickens outside for a night without a sturdy enclosure.  

Then start over with a new batch of baby chicks.  

Now that you’ve got your second batch going back in the bathroom,  it’s time to construct a home for them.  Your chickens may be able to live in your fenced in backyard during the day, but having a pen large enough to leave them in for a few days or a week at a time can be very conducive to your being able to go on vacation and have someone else tend them.  An ideal home for a chicken will have both indoor and outdoor space, elevated food and water dispensers and varying heights of perches and nest boxes.  Your birds should have more outdoor space than indoor space, and for their safety you should either have a “floored” indoor space that they can be closed into at night, or you should sink chicken wire down below the level of the ground on each wall to keep diggers from being successful at getting midnight snacks.  I recommend the former solution, it’s easier and it can help you manage cold weather, brooding hens and the need to continually catch the chickens for your four year-olds edification.  

On day one of their new living space do not let the chickens into the yard, giving them a week or two of simply being in the pen will imprint onto their tiny impressionable brains the idea that the pen is where they live. Without this impression getting your chickens to return to the coop as night falls will be virtually impossible.  Unable to find either the bathroom, or their cardboard box in the tub, your chickens will conclude that they are lost, and attempt to sleep as far off the ground as they can propel their little chicken bodies.  Chicken memories are very short.  “Home” will become the coop in less than a fortnight.

If they’re nearing that 8-10 week mark as they are adjusting to living outside of the bathtub, you might even get an early layer who learns that the nest boxes (always stocked with clean straw) are a good and safe place to lay eggs.  This will be an invaluable lesson, but unfortunately it’s not one that you can control.  Your chickens will at first lay eggs wherever they please.  It will only be age, luck or a lazy streak that will compel them to lay eggs in the coop where they are easy to find.   You can remedy this by placing the eggs you will find under your porch, in the dog house, behind the hose and on your neighbor’s lawn chair in the nest boxes until the hens figure things out.

At this point, the 10--14 week mark, your chickens should be living outside, mostly feathered, losing their short-lived and limited ability to even do anything that vaguely resembled flying.  This is also the point at which any “pretty chickens” you’ve somehow landed yourself with, will begin to crow..