Chicken Rearing 101 – How Not to Raise Chickens

Chick: A hatchling

Capon: A castrated male used for meat. (How much could that return?)

Pullet: A female chicken under a year-old.

Hen: A female poultry within one year of age

Rooster: A male chicken over one year of age.

Raising Chickens for the first time can be tricky. When I first called the Feed ShopI was hoping to sound like a pro. I inquired,”Do you sell pullets?” “Yes”, the man responded. “Are they all guys?” It has been an uphill battle ever since.

Pullet parenthood is an much of an adventure as child rearing, just with more feces for each pound of body weight. But, I have been reading quite a little on poultry things. (Yes, my coolness only switched over in its grave.) So if I am right and I am quite sure I’m not, here is how chicken rearin’ goes.

Visit your community feed store and buy $10.00 values of girls and $50 worth of supplies and food. Do not overlook that the water dispensers. Buying the metal ones, never plastic is always advised. I’ve yet to observe a metal .

Next, place the chicks someplace plump, like a bedroom cupboard. Toss in some highly flammable straw or wood shavings and promptly dangle a luminous warmth lamp just above them. Note to self: Update homeowner’s policy.

For the upcoming few months feed them 3 pounds of food every day and eliminate 4 lbs of sh*t every day from the cupboard. Despite all logic that the birds get larger. As the mature feathers grow in make sure to clip a few of their wings. That is one per bird, not just 1 wing total. If trimming is completed late chicks will nest in your own toilet. This really is a poor thing.

Clipping can be achieved by tossing your scissors and your own body to the heaping mound of chicks, poop and straw. Catch a wiggling screeching bird in the bile heap. Restrain it with a single hand. Stretch out the wing with your second hand. Clip off 50 percent of the wings outer ten feathers along with your third hand.

As the birds develop adjust the warmth light temperature by one level every day. No, this is not actually possible. That’s not my purpose. You begin at 100 levels for hatchlings then keep down by one degree per day until your bedroom is at a minimum of 3 degrees cooler than the spring blizzard out your window.

Once you’ve suspended your ear to your semi-cannibalistic down pillow and the girls have grown their adult feathers, then they can be moved outside into the coop. I estimate that the initial closet rearing point to have shot five decades.

Prior to the movement, go through the Joy of Wing Clipping one longer. Feather clipping not works the first time. No one knows why. Still, after all of the hassle you probably don’t need these to fly the coop in under sixty seconds. Naturally, when you’re like methis time you might have a tendency to package them each a lunch and make a pile of Greyhound tickets from the spacious coop gate.

Regarding habitat construction: Hen houses and chicken coops are a competitive art form. You will find a myriad of web sites showing off architectural designs out of Chicken Chateaus to Bird Bordellos. The meticulous craftsmanship leaves my home look like — like a chicken coop.

Always fashionable, I went with a shabby chic motif for the coop. The nesting boxes are a eclectic mix of milk crates affixed to the wall by anything in arms reach. As for the coop itself, there’s a present for tight chicken wire, which divides me. Quite frankly, my first attempt at a coop looks like Dr. Seuss dropped a hit of acid, blasted some Jefferson Starship and wrapped about on the cord with everyone in Whoville. I think I will keep it.

Bad layout aside, I finally learned a thing or two. The nesting boxes are supposed to be up off the floor. That’s accurate. For those of you keeping score you just spent two weeks trimming the birds back flight feathers simply to hang their homes in the sky. It’s just sick.

Higher than the nest boxes, so you are going to create a roost. This is where the birds garbage at night so they do not crap in your eggs. Obviously the roost is usually OVER the nesting boxes, so regardless of what you do, don’t use those perforated plastic milk crates.

For young birds maintain a warmth light in the hen house. On cooler nights an animal with a brain the size of a bulimic toe nail clipping will likely make the conscious decision to forgo your nest boxes, skip the instinctual roost and jump to a youth bed.

And lastly there is the feed program. I asked several experts and read up on feeding as well. Be certain you present your chickens, starter formula, mash, growth formula, start & grow, brood formula, grit, no grit, bits, no bits, goat placenta, nothing suggested on the internet, tetramyaicn, no antibiotics, medicated newcomer, non-medicated starter rather than ever switch in-between.

I might not be Queen of the Coop yet, but I’m working with it. Although I am still a zoologist and I know Birds 101. Here are two myths I will help with. First, you don’t need a rooster to receive eggs. Most folk, especially those who have never owned cows, will advise you on chickens. Each will insist you need a rooster for some time to do his manly obligations, then it is possible to slip him from the bud. As appealing as this idea is, your bud is another matter.

Roosters are just needed to make fertile eggs. Hens are all that is needed to make breakfast eggs. Fertile eggs are merely peachy if raising girls was such a joy the first time you wish to replicate the whole freakin’ procedure. Moreover there’s always the chance of breaking up a fertilized egg open and finding a 50% formed chick embryo hitting on your hot skillet. Yum! Years of therapy will follow.

To help keep it right in your mind consider this: You are going in your own life. Suddenly enormous balls of calcium start stacking up inside your stomach. Are you really going to carry on to them simply because you haven’t had sex lately?

The second bird fantasy is totally unrelated so that I thought I’d mention it. Penguins occur in nature from the Equator on Southward. That’s down to the Antarctica, not the Arctic! No, they do not hang out with Polar Bears who reside in the Arctic. No, you did not see them if you worked in Alaska, in the Arctic. Those were puffins. No, I am not sorry you look stupid to those folks you informed penguin stories to.

Yes, some penguin species even reside around the Galapagos Islands in the equator (Cold weather could kill them), not drifting about on icebergs – and not at the Arctic! Yes, I realize my eggs are not all in one basket. Delusional, close-minded men and women who insist you will need a rooster to purify your penguin eggs so that polar bears will not loose their food supply drove me crazy!