My career as a chicken farmer started when I ordered 5 bantams from mypetchicken.com. I ordered them in June to arrive around September 1. At the time I didn’t think about them still being young in the coldest part of winter. For a couple of months after I ordered them, we thought about and read about chicks and chickens. With a few weeks to go, Joan started building the coop.
Before the coop was finished we acquired our first chicken. A friend with chickens had one that was sickly and the rest of the flock picked on her. She was a very pretty, sweet chicken, a Salmon Favarolle, so we took her and set her up on the screened porch until the coop was ready. She had a straw nest and rocking chairs to roost on. The chicks came while she was living out there so we had five new, one day old chicks living in a Rubbermaid tub and Esmeralda (yes, we named her) all living on the porch.
Once Esmeralda started feeling better she jumped up on our legs and roosted on our shoulders when we sat on the porch. We fell in love with her because of the noises she made when she sat on our shoulders. It was one of the most relaxing things I’ve experienced. We called it chicken therapy. Our two small dogs didn’t understand why they couldn’t go on the porch with us any more. We finally decided to start exposing the dogs to the chicken and chicks and they all got along pretty well with supervision.
Four of us are co-chicken-parents: Joan and I, and our neighbors and best friends, Jan and Colleen. Our yards are joined so our dogs, there are six total, have more room to run. Their back yard has more open space, so the vegetable garden and chicken coop are there. We have always cared for each other’s pets and when we ordered pet chickens, it was a joint decision. Between the four of us, it seems like one of us is home most of the time.
The bantam chicks came in the mail to the post office. Jan went with me to pick them up. It was so much fun seeing the reactions of the postal workers and the other patrons when we picked up the little cheeping package. There was a family there with two little girls, and I couldn’t resist showing off my babies to the girls.
At home we put them in the nest we had created for them with straw, newspaper and a Rubbermaid tub. I immediately started taking pictures with my phone to send to Joan who was at work. They had brooding lamp to keep them warm and practically full-time attention from four doting “moms”. I’ve heard it for years from parents, so often it sounds trite, but they grew up so fast! Within a few days, it seems like, they started growing tiny feathers on their butts and then on their itty bitty wings. They went from golf-balled sized fuzz balls to little birds, and then they started looking like chickens. Since they are bantams they never got very big, but they grew! It seemed like everyday when we came home from work they had grown more. They got too big for the first tub I’d put them in, and I had to move them to a larger one.
When the chicks were four weeks old we moved them, all six, to the finished coop. I counted to five then because the little ones all ran around in a pack. When I watched them play I automatically began counting in my head. If one wasn’t with the rest I had to keep looking to finish my count. We put them in the fenced vegetable garden to roam and scratch. Esmeralda was always a little off to the side in her own world. When they got big enough one of the bantams would occasionally fly to the top of the fence and think about escaping. Eventually they could simply fly over the fence and one of us jumped up to chase them back in. We took all the chairs that used to be on the deck and moved them into the yard where we could watch the chicken antics. We sat by the garden one day and named all of the bantams.
Xena (after the Warrior Princess) was the most aggressive. Lily had a widow’s peak design on her head that reminded us of Lily Munster. Lola was all black and the inspiration for her name would take too much explanation. The two “blondes”, two beige girls with salmon and silver highlights, took longer. One we named Gabrielle for Xena’s sidekick. The other had more silver around her head so we named her Emmylou for one of our favorite country musicians.
No comments:
Post a Comment