Backyard Chickens Guide

   Chickens are hilariously stupid ground fowl who never depart from an overwrought fear of predation and the unmitigated joy of pursuing and gulping down all manner of disgusting bugs and worms.  Bathing in dirt, enjoying horrible sexual relations, joyfully flapping and running in the best spring and summer mornings, and above all, the relentless, exuberant championing of every hen for herself by whatever means possible, makes them endlessly entertaining.  Even the smart birds in the world such as stellar’s jays, ravens, and crows must watch from above with a mixture of amusement and scorn at these artless, plump, incompetent flyers as they roll in the dirt and cluck with alarm at squirrels and cats.  Even crows have the sense to bath in water.

   The following suggestions on keeping chickens describe ideal facilities.  Whether  you have 2 or 2,000, the set-up I describe for their house, shelter, and yard are scalable to the number of birds you want to have.  The important thing is to give them a humane, satisfying life so that they give you back lots of eggs and good meat.  Keep in mind that flower and vegetable gardening are compatible with chickens for spring and summer only if you fence them out of newly worked ground, because the chickens will destroy your garden with their scratching.  In designing where you will let them go, keep in mind that anywhere it’s even remotely possible that they could defecate or decimate with their dirt scratching, they will.  They’ll rip apart things in flower pots and compost piles expeditiously since those are the prime worm habitat they hunt for.

House  

   The gold standard of chicken set-ups would be an insulated house with power to it for an indoor light bulb during the darkest winter months, and air conditioning in regions of hot summers.  It would be designed using the chimney air drawing idea that some forest service latrines use, where a chimney stack is vented at the bottom down in the septic hole.  If a chicken house were air tight and its lowest part be a manure sump below the roost with a chimney vent at that low level, air would flow into the house from leaks or vents higher up and help pull out bad air around the manure.  The roost should be a flat board at least three inches wide, with a good 7 inches of length for every bird.  They like a high roost, but not so high that it becomes a stress for them to get up to it, so three or four feet of flight is about the max.  You can staircase the roosts, so that they can get as high as the rafters, if you want, which they would love.  Having an insulated house and an inside light, with weather stripping to seal person and chicken doors would mean the ability to efficiently maintain egg production in the winter and keep the birds warm and dry during bitter winter nights, and to air condition to avoid heat mortality if you are raising fast growing fryers.  If a winter light is used, then you will need to have sanitary setups for food and water in the house.  Shoveling and then pressure washing out the manure sump every few weeks or months would keep it clean-use the manure in your compost and in the garden.  Chicken wire over the sump would keep the birds from going into the droppings, and also to keep them from eating any softshell eggs they lay while on the roost, so long as the mesh you use is big enough to let egg stuff fall through.  The person door should be accessible without needing to go into the chicken’s pen.

   One nesting box for every three to four hens is enough.  The reality is that the group think of chickens means that they’ll find one or two boxes that they think of as acceptable even if you’ve made them twenty, piling on and pecking each other out of it despite a perfectly fine space right next to the occupied box.  They want a somewhat elevated, somewhat secluded, somewhat dark, pretty cushy little space.  It’s a Goldilocks selection.  Hens begin laying around five months of age.  Collect eggs every day to prevent them from breaking eggs as they galumph themselves in and out of the nesting boxes, and then discovering that they like to eat eggs.  Hens often announce that they’ve laid an egg with an awful, loud call that sounds the same, pretty much, as the call they make when alarmed.  It’s interesting to speculate on what the purpose is of this annoying post-egg cluck.  Is it a call for a rooster?

Outdoor Yard

   The house’s chicken door that opens to a fenced in, large circular yard (a circle gives the most interior space compared to a square or rectangle) would have internal divisions as well as adjacent cultivated sections where grains could be planted and grow to maturity before letting the birds into it.  Next to the house would be a large, open ground shed so that they could be out of the rain and hot sun.  A sand box under that shed would allow for all-weather dust bathing.  There would be lots of outdoor elevated rails for day roosting, with stair step elevations to give them a challenge for getting up to the highest levels.  The yard’s internal sections would allow for a managed pasturing system, so that plants and bug populations have some days to recover.  The sections of planted grains ought to be a green manuring system so that the birds eat the grain, and then the ground is closed off to the chickens and cultivated for a rotation of vegetable gardening.

   The yard should have galvanized or vinyl coated hog wire buried at least a foot into the ground, completely enclosing their yard, and it should be at least seven feet high, with a hardwired single line of electric fence at the top.  The danger of predation depends on where you live, of course.  A big outdoor dog that’s out at night will also help keep raccoons and coyotes away.

Food and Water

   Chickens need a continuous supply of water, which should be clean.  The ideal would be a circulating system that comes from a supply that’s clean, with the water returning to the supply having a filter system.  For adult birds, the water needs to be off the ground four to six inches, so that they don’t shovel stuff into the trough.  The dirt on their beaks ends up in the waterer.  For backyard birds that have a little waterer, in the summer, you can water the lawn and refresh their water by hosing it out and refilling it on the lawn two or three times a day.

   Unless you have an extensive rotational pasturing system, you will need to buy them feed.  They prefer pellets rather than mash because it’s hard to eat a dry powder-mash.  The mash works for chicks in their first three weeks of life.  It’s very important to either take in all the feed every night, or make a sealing dumbbell cover over their feed trough that can go on after they’ve roosted, so that rodents and other animals don’t live off your chicken feed.  Do not store the feed where rodents can get to it.  Rats and mice are an awful health hazard and do terrible damage to structures with their chewing, nesting, peeing, and defecation.  They’re also very smart.  The only way I have succeeded in killing rats, when they’ve taken up residence, is by mixing the poison bait with peanut butter and leaving it in the rat’s path of travel overnight.  Once the rat finally dies, bury it deeply to keep predators from eating the poisoned rat.

   The container the chickens eat out of needs a design that will prevent them from spreading the feed all over the place.  They like to give their feed sharp spattering pecks in order to see what’s underneath, so a pretty wide lip overhanging the inside top edge of a feeding trough helps to keep the feed in the trough.  Don’t give them an open bowl of food.  They’ll just tip it over in the first seconds of having access to it.

   Chickens have good instincts for avoiding poisonous plants, but inevitably they’ll take bites of anything that they’re around for long periods of time.  Poison hemlock, foxglove (digitalis), tomato and potato leaves (the nightshade genus), and lots more, are poison.

   A head flip upon trying to give them something is the determinative expression of rejection.  Bizarrely, chickens will not eat citrus of any sort, nor mangos.  They love strawberries almost as much as worms.  They don’t like strongly scented leaves like garlic or mint.  Chickens love meat, so a good use of bacon fat, and the fat from other pork and beef you have is to give it to the chickens.  Fish discards are great for omega 3 and a source for shell building calcium.  On principle I never give them poultry because I find cannibalism abhorrent; as a practical matter, bizarre diseases such as spongiform encephalopathy are caused by cannibalism.  So don’t do it, even after Thanksgiving.  I suspect chocolate screws up estrogen flows in chickens, based on a no-egg span that occurred after giving them old Oreos.
   The reaction to slugs and snails varies with each bird, and is not predictable.  Sometimes they'll snatch down big adult slugs, sometimes they'll refuse to eat any.  Some birds love snails but won't touch slugs.  They change what they eat for incscrutable reasons.

Addressing Chicken Behaviors

   Strangely, loud noises, such as the lawn mower, don’t bother chickens as much as it seems they should, but flapping tarps or sheets are terrifying, because they’re like birds of prey.  Make sure tarps you have over woodpiles and such like are weighted and tied so they don’t flap.

   There’s a number of perverse behaviors that can be avoided and controlled with proper care.  Their pecking order, going broody, roosters, getting old, and hens eating their eggs, are problems.

   Population density exacerbates the pecking order behaviors.  The less room and more competition there is for food and space, the more aggressive the pecking becomes.  Not only is that the sum of human history, it is also relevant to chicken population density.  At its worst, the hens on the bottom will be killed by targeted cannibalism.   A stage less horrendous is that the lowest ranking birds have their downy feathers pulled out, and their combs pecked.  In its normal state, it’s nothing more than an occasional sidling peck to remind a lower bird who’s primadonna.  The more space you can give them, the better they’ll be, and having their yard filled with tall grass, bushes to hop up into, rotting logs to scrape at, and such like will keep them absorbed in their monomaniacal wormy/buggy pursuits instead of fighting over a perceived resource scarcity.

   ‘Going broody’ happens in the spring when a hen gets a huge rush of maternity hormones, causing her to do nothing but sit on the nest.  Chickens can’t ‘think’ in terms of rational abstraction, so a hen doesn’t consider whether a rooster has fertilized her eggs, or if she’s sitting on eggs at all.  The problem with a broody hen is that they stop laying while broody, and it lasts for more than a month (21 or more days of incubation, plus a couple weeks of endocrine reversion), at the time of year when they should be laying every day.  Broodiness starts with a hen getting a dullness in the eye and fluffing themselves up, squawking in outrage at the presence of wild birds, and a pathetic little cluck cluck they do high in the throat while they’re broody.  Their normal vocalisms stop.  As soon as you see a hen doing this, put her in a box in the dark for three days, letting her out only briefly to eat and drink.  The idea is to block the light which triggers the hormones of broodiness.  Keep her in the dark until the little pathetic cluck clucks stop and she resumes normal behavior. 

   If you want to hatch eggs, make sure you get a clutch of fertilized eggs under her soon after her broodiness starts.  Make sure mother hen gets enough water and food while she’s in her mother infatuation.  21 days later, the newborn chicks need the chick mash and easy access to shallow little cups of water so they can't drown in it.
   The very fast growing breeds grown for meat in agribusiness will die of heat stress in temperatures above the mid-nineties.  Their hearts can't keep up with the needed pace of cooling circulation; their bodies have grown faster than what the heart can support, so they die of heat stroke.  As stated above, an insulated building with an air conditioner will prevent these heat losses.

   Lice get brought in and can be stopped with a thorough cleaning of their house and putting insecticidal powder on the birds.  If you catch a chicken and hold them by their feet, holding them down to prevent panicked flapping, they'll just hang still.  That allows you to ruffle the powder into their down feathers to get it to their skin of the warm belly and under the wings.  Burn all the litter that was in their house, scrub the house down, and apply a lice killer to their house.
   Roosters aren’t going to work for backyards in this modern U.S. of A.; your neighbors won’t tolerate it.  If you do live where there’s auditory room for them, you’ll need 12 to 20 hens for every rooster.  If you only have a few hens, don’t try to keep a rooster.  He’ll make himself a mauling pest.  Aside from the avoidance of developing egg eating hens, it becomes important to collect eggs every day with a rooster so that you can refrigerate the eggs in order to stop the fetal development.

End of Life: Meat and Post-Menopausal Hens   
   Note that small scale slaughtering rules of Washington State allow for sale of dressed poultry on farm and at farmers markets for 20,000 birds or less.  20,000 or more, and then the federal, USDA rules apply.  These sanitation rules must be followed for any butchering done for retailing purposes.
   Reasonable chicken care includes your commitment to butcher them in the fall of their fourth or fifth year, when egg production drops precipitously. 

http://agr.wa.gov/Marketing/SmallFarm/DOCS/6-PoultryProcessingAndMarketingRegulations.pdf