Chicken update

Our raptor-ladies, EliZ-zabeth and Chicken-little, have now been in residence for just over 27 weeks – although in many ways it seems a great deal longer. In that time they’ve consumed approximately 70kg of Poultry Mix – with the help of the local pigeon community. These cooing scroungers, aka feral pigeons or rock doves, are part of the landscape in Perth. From the ever-increasing number of visitors to the chook pen, it’s clear that the easy access to grain and water has been most enticing. It reached the point where a veritable flock of them were congregating in the run every morning, enabling them to monster the ladies away from their food. Not something we’d considered.

What we also didn’t take into account when setting up our open plan chicken run was that cats might turn out to be an issue. Naive, I admit, but the learning curve was rapid when it was brought to my attention with a vengeance a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that a large, rather pretty tortoiseshell cat had taken to lurking around, presumably in the hopes of some tasty take-out. This caused merry havoc for one and all as EliZ-zabeth made good with her vocal chords, putting them to the test with great vigour. Her alarm-cries brought both me and MissCassie (brave-hunter-spaniel) barrelling out of the house posthaste – me to look confused and ask foolish questions like “What?” “Where” “Are you okay, ladies?” and MissCass to follow her nose and bark like a demented thing. Why? Because she tracked down MrCat, serenely sunning himself on top of the front wall and not in the least bit fussed by the commotion.

That didn’t last! He most definitely did NOT appreciate being be-dampened by an arm-waving-hose-spraying-demented-chicken-parent, leaving in a flurry with nary a glance over his shoulder. Until the next day- and the next – and so on. A solution had to be found, posthaste, before MrCat had his way with the ladies.

After some debate we came up with: 1) As soon as I heard EliZ-zabeth sound off, I’d release the tiger – aka MissCassie – who’d shoot round the corner to the chook pen in hunt mode. 2) Himself came up with a cunning plan for some changes to the run. This is, of course, is a better long term solution – although the tiger has been enjoying the chase and now rushes to the door whenever the chickens raise their voices past a murmur-cluck.

The upgrade involves a number of connecting ‘pods’, all fully fenced (including the top!), so that the ladies can still roam around under the fruit trees, but in a somewhat more contained fashion. Their new tunnels allow them to peck around and scuttle backwards and forwards, but provides them with safety from the marauding feline. In addition, we hope they’ll be less at risk from any nasties from wild birds (like the pigeons), who may carry avian influenza – a source of increasing concern for backyard chicken-people.

So, that dealt with, back to the food – and eggs. Along with the scratch mix (grain), the ladies get assorted greens, fruit scraps and suchlike. Whatever is surplus to requirements in the kitchen or the veg garden, really. Now that the mornings are a fair bit cooler, they’ve even been getting some warm porridge mixed into the grain every few days. This they make short work of, chirruping and twittering madly as they compete to gobble it down. Despite all this, egg production is right down, presumably due to the weather but possibly also because they’ve been feathering up. Both now look charmingly dorky (instead of plain scary) and we’re happy to hit pause on the eggs so that the ladies can be fully dressed for winter. Besides which, between them they’ve provided us with 194 eggs to date. This averages out to about half a dozen a week and is pretty much as many as we actually need. Also, in the event that we do run low on eggs, the chooks up at Gallifrey Forest Farm are producing about a dozen a day at the moment and DD is happy to share – so we’re doing okay!