This morning I was out for another walk around the property when I found a single chicken leg.  The few feathers still left on it indicated that it formerly belonged to one of our Rhode Island Reds.  While I was checking this out I heard a curious scratching coming from the top of a large nearby pine tree.  I got to the base of it, and looking up noticed two fisher cats scratching around.  Turning to continue my exploration I noticed another fisher cat on a stump, about to climb the neighboring tree.  I looked him dead in the face as if to say, “you eat my chickens, bub?”. Strangely it didn’t reply but instead just started climbing the tree. As if three fisher cats weren’t enough, as I was coming out of the small pine grove I noticed another fisher cat on the forest floor.  He looked at me for a while and I looked at him and then he took off into a thicket.

Now, from what I understand when a fisher cat takes a chicken, or any bird it leaves feathers everywhere.  It’s not uncommon for fishers to get “blood lust” and continue to kill more than they could ever eat (like this fisher that killed 69 turkeys) but they generally don’t take the time to carry all the bodies away.  Though it’s possible that a mother brought the bodies back as food for her kits.  Fishers are solitary animals, so the only explanation for so many being so close together is that a mother is raising her kits in the pine grove.

Fishers give birth in April/May and mate again shortly thereafter.  Due to a process called delayed implantation the kits will take a year to be born.  Usually, the kits stay with the mother until fall.  While it’s possible that the mother killed all 15 and brought the bodies back, I’m thinking that the fisher(s?) showed up, scared the chickens, killed at least one, and the rest just took off running.  The lack of mayhem in the coop makes me skeptical that all 15 could have been killed there.  No blood, no feathers, just empty.

For those unfamiliar, a fisher is a large member of the weasel family.  They make their homes high up in trees and occasionally in burrows or rock cavities.  Males can range from 7-20 pounds in extreme cases, while females are usually between 4 and 6 pounds.  Fishers have large feet with five toes and retractable claws.  They can rotate their back paws 180 degrees and climb down trees headfirst.  Females have a range of about 10 square miles, while males have a range of up to 30.  They are very capable predators, but despite fear mongering in the media pose no real threat to humans, I’ve been face to face with them a few times and neither party has ever felt very threatened.

The problem with all this of course, is that the chickens could flee a spot they consider dangerous for days.  Each day they are gone the fishers have the chance to hunt them on their turf.  Again, work took me from a full on search, but between this evening and tomorrow I hope to able to find some definitive evidence so we can decide on a course of action.

I got up at 5:30 and hiked around the property to try and find any sign that could clue me in on what happened to our chickens. Nothing to be seen. No blood, feathers, sign of a feeding frenzy, nada, zilch. It’s a rainy morning here and I really expected that to drive them from wherever they must be hiding, but they seem to be staying put.

I say “where they must be hiding” because I can’t imagine how an animal big enough to eat 15 chickens could enter and exit the fenced in yard with no sign of any kind of struggle. I imagine it must have come in and taken them one at a time, because I’m not sure how you take two at a time without spilling blood. Further, I don’t understand why it would take them so far away to eat them as to leave no trace anywhere nearby. Perhaps 15 owls came by before they were all to go in for the night and had a feast in which they consumed the entire animal, feet and all.

Most frustrating in all this is that there isn’t anyone to ask, “Is it normal that they don’t come home sometimes?” or “Where should I start looking?”. I’ve got this idea that they must be up in the trees somewhere riding out the storm. Which is stupid because they’ve got a chicken house right here. I’m sitting at the breakfast table looking out on the fields and woods expecting the rooster to just come marching his girls all back home. Though thinking about it, I can’t say that I’m actually surprised that an animal I’ve seen eat it’s own poop is acting stupid.

I can’t imagine they could have made it all the way up to the barn, but I’m running out of places to look. I’m inclined to think they are all roosting somewhere and not dead, though since they spent last night outside of the fenced in yard they could be dead now, even if they weren’t originally.

Truth be told having them all be either dead or alive would make our next course of action infinitely easier. Obviously if they are alive we can just keep on keeping on. If they’re dead we can just raise a new flock. If only half return, then we have the trouble of adding outside birds into our flock which could lead to disease spreading.

I guess I’ll find out the story when I get home from work tonight.

A dark night in a country that knows how to keep it’s secrets, but at Sol Shine Farm two farmers are still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions… specifically where are our chickens? Why didn’t they come home? If they were eaten where is all the blood?

Is it normal for chickens to just not come home sometimes? They’ve been wandering farther and farther from the coop lately but this is the first time they haven’t returned- actually, that’s not accurate, for a week there were only 14 chickens, but then all of a sudden there was 15 again… maybe that decenter showed the rest of them a secret roosting spot? We’ll have to see what it looks like in the morning.

We’re currently very confused.

I recently wrote an article for homestead.org about sheep shearing complete with some pictures from the farm. Rather than repost and layout the whole article you can check it out here:

http://www.homestead.org/MatthewSurabian/Shearing/ShearingSheep.htm

I made this video of the lazy bed about two weeks ago. I need to make another soon, the vines are taking over! In the meantime, enjoy this one.

Just a status update. In this video you can see the finished coop, and our chickens milling around looking for worms in the yard.

When I returned from fishing last night the house was quiet for the first time in what seems like a long time. I don’t have to come in and deal with chicks all over the house (heh) or go hunting for presents left on my kitchen floor. Not gunna lie, it’s a nice feeling. Raising the chickens in the house was a good experience, but I’m glad that we made a coop that will allow us to divide one side from the other and utilize various doors to keep younger birds separate from the older ones; because that means that we won’t have to fill the house with baby chicks again.

I’m also curious to experiment with allowing a hen from the flock to raise chicks herself. I get the feeling that’s a practice that is slowing dying out. I think the reason stems from a shift in agricultural practices by the next generation. In the past there wasn’t a massive communication network connecting people to people all over the world and things were done the way your father/grandfather/great-grandfather had done them. Conceivably this wasn’t always for the best since not everyone’s father can be the most efficient educated person attempting a task, but regardless of their efficacy, techniques came from a tradition of trial and error and humble roots. Somewhere along the line the paradigm shifted from continuing tradition to re-inventing what farming was. Increasingly literature on the subject and common knowledge advises us to employ methods that are essentially large scale industrial farming practices shrunk down to fit in the home garden or the home livestock pen.

Honestly I don’t know which works better (though I have my suspicions). I figure there must have been a reason that we “stopped” doing certain things when it comes to farming. Unfortunately often times the only reason practices, no matter how beneficial, have fallen into disuse is that they don’t lend themselves well to large scale mechanized production.

Our chicken breeds are a perfect example of this. Why is the Rhode Island Red a recovering species? Because they don’t grow big as quickly as a big dumb modern meat-hybrid and they don’t lay as constantly as a big dumb modern laying-hybrid. True enough, but I don’t need to feed 5 states from a major distribution center, do I? The end result means we’re breeding desirable traits like independence and hardiness out of an entire species of livestock in favor of gluttony.

The same goes for the plant kingdom. We’re more inclined to seek out modern hybrid varieties that allow us to grow the biggest _______ or the most productive _________. Never mind the detail that a lot of these hybrid varieties are sterile and the seeds from the plant can not be used for the next generation. Or the harm that sterile hybrid pollen can have on neighboring non-hybrid plants. Essentially plants have unprotected relations with bees all the time, and when pollen from a non-hybrid comes into contact with pollen from a sterile hybrid the end result can be two fields of sterile crop rather than just one.

Other techniques such as mono cropping (think: GIANT corn fields) facilitate a simple mechanized harvest, while at the same time robbing the soil of vital nutrients. To continue the corn example, tradition might be to plant corn together with peas and squash. The squash and pea vines may climb the corn stock for support, but they also replenish vital nutrients like nitrogen that the corn removes from the soil. At the end of the season the peas can be left to seed and the pea sprouts can be turned into the soil as a green manure for next years crop allowing land to be constantly reused for various crops.

Unfortunately all this knowledge is simply an aggregation of information from various books, articles and documentaries, and I can’t say for sure whether or not it’s all going to work in a beautiful circle of life like in the Lion King.  I guess there’s only one way to find out, right?

The chicks have made it through two relatively cool nights without a problem.  They seem to really be enjoying their new home and thriving in it.  I can only imagine this trend it going to continue.  In other news it rained last night and the roof seems to be leak-free.  Being that I’d never shingled a roof before I was pretty happy about that.

Video update from the coop soon!

It’s important to raise baby chicks inside for a while. There isn’t a general consensus on exactly how long “a while” is, in fact, there isn’t a general consensus on much when it comes to raising chickens.  Whether this is a function of all the different breeds or all the different attitudes of their owners is unclear.  We’ve read about some owners keeping their birds inside for up to 10 weeks.  For us, two weeks seemed to be the limit.

On Sunday we were roused by several birds peeping and running around the living room playing keep away with a small scrap of paper.  I can only assume that these were our three Rhode Island Red roosters jocking for position in the flock’s hierarchy.  We did our usual morning routine of filling the food and water and then going back to bed.  When we woke up for breakfast there were now several more chickens out of the brooder (did I mention they can fly now? They can fly now) and they were starting to venture into the kitchen, scratching and pecking at the floor, looking for bugs.

Being such generous creatures they left several offerings all around the house’s hardwood floors and stone hearth.  As one of our books put it “the smell was starting to become an issue” and we decided that today would be the day that they would go outside.  They have more than doubled in size and have lots of feathers.  Aside from that, if they’re so eager to get out of the brooder and into the real world, let’s give em what they’re asking for; the classic: “if you want to act like an adult you’re going to be treated like an adult”.  Of course moving them outside meant we had to finish the coop today, before the rain came.

There were still some mission critical items that needed to be done to the coop in order to move our flock in.  Specifically we were missing: a front access door, all three guillotine style chicken doors, hardware cloth/barbed wire predator protection, and some outside shingles.  We got to work quickly and didn’t stop till the sun was just about down.  We both handled the access door and shingles, I put up the hardware cloth and barbed wire on the ventilation holes of the shed roof while Taryn tackled the chicken doors.

The front

The back

Inside back

Inside front

With the coop finished we covered the floor in a mix of hay and duff (the top layer of forest) and rounded up the birds from all corners of our home.  We had run an extension cord out to the coop so that we could plug in the brooder out there and give them a good heat source for the next few weeks while they gain the remainder of their feathers.  We brought the birds out there and turned them lose inside.  It was getting dark so they were more than a little apprehensive about the change in scenery.  They huddled together under the brooder and got ready for their first night exposed to the elements.

With the birds getting acclimated to their new home we set out on an even more daunting task than coop construction: cleaning the manure from our house.  It was everywhere.  I took the stone hearth, and Taryn took the wood floors.  I’m not sure who had the better deal. The stone involved a lot of water and scraping with a putty knife, while the wood involved a lot of hunting to ensure that every offering was found.

After an hour of cleaning, the house no longer smelled or looked like the inside of a chicken coop and we went out for a much deserved dinner.  The entire process of raising chickens in the house has taught me one very important lesson: chickens are livestock.  They are happiest when left to be themselves.  They are not a dog, cat, or human.  Maybe it’s because we got old-time breeds, but there’s no way those birds would have been happy in the house for another day, let alone 10 weeks.  They need their own space to do their own thing.

We went out this morning to check on them, not really sure what we’d find.  We felt like this would be the “second cut” so to speak.  I figured at least one or two would die in the moving process just from the stress of a new place, or the temperature, which was around 50F last night.  We found all of them happily exploring their new home in the morning light, we didn’t lose a single one.  Considering we’ve only lost 1 (a Rhode Island Red) this whole time, I’m feeling pretty confident in our instincts as poultry farmers.

I feel like we’re getting close to understanding the 1800’s mindset.  When we were cleaning up the chicken waste from our house we were talking about how our perspectives on food and livestock were changing as a result of the whole “chicken experience”.  I know factory farming is wrong, and I don’t want to support it, and I’m not alone in that sentiment.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it is that we can really do about it.  It seems so silly, the answer is pretty obvious, we do what we’ve always done: raise the food ourselves.  I’ve heard a lot of conversations about factory farming, people discussing all of the what-if solutions and scenarios, the rights of the animal, the rights of the carnivore, the profits of the companies, the health implications for animal and consumer.  When I was down on the ground scrapping manure off my floor, I realized that we can finally talk in specifics.  We can draw the lines that others can’t because we’re living our own solution.  Never had it been clearer than when we opened the coop door to see our flock happily peeping and strutting around: we are the solution, we are the small family farm.

I love Huey Lewis, I do, but come to think of it, Fore! isn’t such a good album.  Sports is WAYYYY better.  Maybe if we listened to Sports before we started on the chicken coop we would have been in better shape.  As it turns out a lot of our lumber wasn’t straight and the floor was out of square.  Our typical mantra of “the chickens won’t notice” had been working all along, but Taryn’s dad assured us that while the chickens probably wouldn’t notice that the floor wasn’t square, the walls certainly would.

The next day he came over with lots of tools and laid some knowledge down on us. In addition to being witty, Taryn’s dad is a construction superintendent and oversees the building of giant buildings in the city, meaning he knows A LOT about construction.  We learned a few tricks of the trade and got the posts re-dug and the floor squared off.  He even helped us to frame the back wall.

To keep us company while we worked he brought Taryn’s family dog, Sandy.  She had a lot of fun running around the yard, barking at my neighbor, and falling into the holes we were digging for the posts.  She even got some pieces of roast beef out of the deal.  Sweet.

The major things we learned were as follows:

• Quality lumber is very important, always go to your local lumber yard
• A chop saw is awesome, and one must be acquired soon
• Screws allow you to easily “adjust” and “remove” where necessary without a mess
• Chalk lines - who knew how useful these things were!
• A framing square is a very important tool
• Framing walls “on the floor” and lifting them into place is the proper way to do it.
• Layout where the studs are going to on the header and footer of the wall, then just nail them into place.
• If you dig the holes carefully with a small shovel, you do not need a post hole digger for footers.
• Whenever possible a large piece of plywood should be used and small pieces should be added on, rather than several equal sized pieces. (Our floor was a foot bigger in width and length than the plywood)  The large piece of plywood will help hold the frame square.
• Experience is the greatest teacher, unless you have a teacher that happens to have a lot of experience.

Seriously, Taryn’s dad brought the project home.  The practical applications of what he showed us are far reaching and will stay with us for all our future construction endeavors.  We drew up the plans to the chicken coop ourselves, and when you’re looking at it on paper, it seems just as easy as cutting the pieces to the right size and fastening them together.  Unfortunately that explanation glosses over a lot of practical areas where serious knowledge is required.  Even just proper use of tools.

It’s really something that is hard to explain but easy to observe.  Watching Taryn’s dad and listening to his advice saved us countless hours of learning by trial and error.  We were able to square the floor, set the footers, and frame the back wall with his help.  Using the tricks he showed us, and the tools he was kind enough to leave with us for the rest of the project, I was able to frame the front wall one morning before having to go help tend the sheep.

He’s going to have to come back and show us how to put on the roof next, because we’re totally in the dark on that one.

Progress After a Day with Taryn’s Dad and a few hours on my own framing the front wall:

This is a video of the chicks being chicks at three days old with the cover off of the brooder.  The red ones are Rhode Island Reds (we have 10), the black ones are barred rocks (we have 8), and the striped ones are silver laced wyandottes (we have 7).

When we ordered our chicks the hatchery sent us a free exotic chick - for free!  We don’t know if it required fancy care, or if living with the big bully new England breeds was too much for it or what, but it has since died.  It’s out in the compost right now.  Even in death it can supply us with much needed organic matter for our vegetables which will be going into the ground soon; the circle continues.  Being that this was an unknown breed we’re not counting it in our mortality statistics.