We currently have 26 five day old chicks in a cardboard box in our mud room. We are raising them to lay and, eventually, brood so hopefully I'll be able to answer this question in about 9-12 months or so.
This is the first time I've ever raised layers though 20 years ago as a teenager, my brother and I raised 100 birds every spring for the family freezer.
An interesting thing about the young chicks, even at 3 days old they were acting exactly like adult birds- making dust baths, establishing a pecking order and even attempting to roost though the only thing elevated in their box is their feeder.
We've done this a few times - both incubating from eggs and receiving chicks mail order. Incubating and seeing the eggs hatch is awesome, but it's also pretty fun to pick up a cheeping box at the post office!
However, it won't be very long until you want them OUT of the mudroom ASAP. The dust and smell from poo and feathers and whatever else gets bad quickly. Not a nice addition to breakfast.
Note that I do seem to be more irritated by it than other family members who like pets more.
> ... but it's also pretty fun to pick up a cheeping box at the post office!
One of the highlights of the years we lived in an extremely rural county in the midwest was the yearly call from our rural post office. This is exactly what was said when we picked up the phone:
"Diederich? Postmaster here. Your birds are at the post office. Thanks, bye."
I don't understand why you were being downvoted but please write a report somewhere and post it here next year, and good luck with the chicks! Just remember to take good care of them, and provide a decent, clean, natural environment for the animals while they live.
We have two acres (1 acre cleared) and don't use any pesticide or herbicide in our yard so I'm sure they will have plenty of natural forage to supplement their grain and room to stretch their legs.
Our biggest concern is the local wildlife which includes mink, weasel, raccoon, skunk and fisher cat. We've seen every one of those creatures on and around our property so I'm trying to devise a critter proof chicken coop to put them in at night and wondering if I should get a dog as well.
I'd say yes to the dog, maybe 2 or 3 given the size of property you have. You'll probably still lose some, though.
As far as the coop is concerned, can't answer much there; my parents raised chickens for eggs when I was a kid, and my dad made the coop (2 x 4 and plywood, then a larger outer "pen" using 4x4s and chicken wire). Provide plenty of shade and water, of course. Instead of chicken wire, you might try something more robust - thicker gauge hardware cloth with closer mesh.
I recall my parent's coop was about a 20 x 30 foot area for the "outdoor" part, then an "indoor" area about 10 x 8 off the side. Fence of chicken wire on the outside was about 8 - 10 feet high, and the indoor part was 8 feet tall (standard plywood dimensions). There was a latched door to the outdoor portion, then an opening to the indoor part (no door). We didn't have any "critter" issues given where we lived (county island in the middle of a suburb neighborhood). Everything was sized so an adult could stand up anywhere, and we kept the chickens penned inside the coop area (we didn't let them run free).
There was always a rooster around, too. Plus we had to trim the chickens wings (because sometimes they would try to fly out of the coop - sometimes successfully and get in the yard area - that was the signal to "clip the wings").
I wouldn't want to do such a thing myself, but my parents loved it. We had fresh eggs all the time, and the occasional fresh chicken (I know where and why the term "running around like a chicken with it's head cut off" comes from - and I helped my mom pluck the carcass, too).
It was a messy and smelly thing to have in a backyard; at one time we had upwards of 60 chickens. Even so, it was a part of my growing up I wouldn't change even if I could.
We incubated a bunch of chicks once, and they all died except one. Knowing they don't do well on their own, we had to buy another day old chick and put them together.
Even at two days old, they started fighting. One chick would wait for the other to start to nod off, and then peck it in the eyeball. We had to put one under a colander for a while until they got used to each other.
my wife was afraid of killing them through some error or omission. We had one little runt (30% smaller than all the others) that we were sure was doing poorly. It refused to move and just sat uncomfortably under the heat lamp chirping like it's life depended on it.
Then yesterday it started behaving normally and is doing great apart from being small. Inexplicably, the same day, I found one of the big healthy black orpington chicks lying unmoving next to the feeder and it perished an hour later.
>This is an edited answer from What does a hen do with her unfertilised eggs? which originally appeared on Quora
Is the Independent sourcing editorial from Quora now? I assume when you answer a question on Quora you give up all rights to the content. I wonder what sort of arrangement they have.
They get off them and then a crow swoops in and steals them. It was never a sure thing as to whether we would get our backyard chickens daily eggs or if the crow would.
Actually they have it right at the beginning. Hens don't know if an egg is fertilized or not. Most will just lay and leave. Some go broody and will sit on the eggs until they hatch. Some hens will sit on the eggs (and collect any nearby eggs and sit on a pile of them) until they die if they don't hatch.
We have about 100 birds and at any given time two or three will be broody. We collect the eggs everyday so sometimes the broody hen will just sit there on nothing or on one of our "fake" eggs (we put fake eggs in the places we want the hens to lay their eggs). We'll remove the broody hens from the coop several times a day until we break them of the habit. That usually works.
Occasionally we'll have snakes get into the coop and eat eggs. If the snake gets a porcelain fake egg that pretty much the end of that snake eventually. Rattlesnakes are more difficult, but we've gotten pretty good had removing those, too.
Our big problem this year is hawks (our chickens free range). We've lost about 20 birds this year just to hawks. Just this last weekend hawks killed three (flew away with two and mostly maimed a third I had to cull) and one hen got away missing her tail feathers and received some deep cuts our vet stitched up. She got away because our dominate rooster attacked and killed the hawk after her.
> Actually they have it right at the beginning. Hens don't know if an egg is fertilized or not.
I hate to nitpick you here, but the person you're replying to is correct, and it's really not at the beginning of the article. Like you reiterate, the article states that the hen doesn't know — which is sensible (how would the hen know?), but doesn't answer our question: "What does a hen do with her unfertilized eggs?"
The article does answer the question for the case of a non-brooding hen: the hen doesn't brood, so not much of anything. But I think a lot of us were more interested in the case of a brooding hen, and the article then tells us about the process for a fertilized egg, which, while interesting, doesn't answer the question.
(I would guess that most of us that were raised in more urban areas believe that most or all hens brood. I did not know that some did and some didn't, for example.)
You, and other commenters in the thread, have thankfully given us closure w.r.t. the question by posting, though.
In the UK, the big problem is foxes. We have an electric fence and automated coop door closer now. We also have a guy that enjoys shooting and roams the fields round our house shooting them.
It has a solar panel and rechargeable battery and you program in your lat/long and optional + or - times for the door to remain open or close around sunrise and sunset.
It works well. Of course, you could hack something up with a micro-controller to do the same thing rather easily.
What do you do with all your eggs and how many eggs per day do you get per 100 birds?
We are fortunate that we don't have a snake problem. We do have red and golden hawks though and they fly around after our neighbors chickens. They haven't lost one to hawks yet though as they have a large guard dog which seems to be effective.
I don't know the exact number; about half of those 100 birds are new this spring and haven't started laying en mass yet. My wife tells me we're currently getting about 3 dozen per day. I sell quite a few at work and my daughter, a vet tech, also sells at her work. If we get too many we hand them out as gifts for the FedEx guy, our Doctor, etc. The gifts usually guarantee repeat business after folks get a taste of fresh eggs.
We recently just got a few puppies from a local animal shelter that we're acclimating to the chickens. We hope that'll cut down on predator loss.
3 dozen per day sound about right for the number of birds laying. My parents had upward of 60 birds; I don't know how many actually laid eggs (this was 25+ years ago when I was a kid).
What my parents did was gather the eggs for the day, wash them, then put them in empty 3 lb coffee cans, put a label on the cans with the date, then refrigerate them. My mom would then sell the eggs (80 cents a dozen) for spending money (she was a stay-at-home mom, dad worked for the county doing road maintenance/construction). She would also separate out the browns from the whites (I think she sold the browns at $1.20 per dozen). Occasionally we'd get a blue or green shell egg, but those weren't sold.
Any not sold after 30 days (IIRC) were thrown out (or maybe put into the slop for our occasional pig, or fed to the dogs - depending on if they were still "ok" enough for that of course). We'd eat some as well, but we had so many chickens that we couldn't eat anywhere near enough to keep the excess from forming, so selling them was the best thing to do with them.
Roosters can be mean as hell. I used to help my cousins with their chickens and we would always have to lure and trap the rooster before we could go near the hens.
Yeah, this is why I came here as well. I was hoping that maybe someone posted the answer to the question I didn't know I wanted an answer for until I saw the article.
parents had backyard chickens for years. Unfertilized, or even fertilized eggs as the was majority of modern chicken aren't going to lay on them until they hatch, are either eaten or ignored.
It depends on the particular bird, but some species will sit on eggs, even to the point of their own starvation. "Broody" is the term -- referring to a general nature to sit on and nurture eggs, working themselves into an almost hypnotic state. Chinese Silkies are known for this. Buff Orpingtons are also good "hatchers."
I have to go in and collect eggs, and pet on my birds to rouse them from their broody state, then force them out of the henhouse to go eat & drink. Otherwise she'll literally sit there on those eggs all day & night.
After a while, the hen might break the eggs and eat them. A way to train against this is to 1) never let it happen (remove eggs promptly) so they don't develop a taste for eggs or 2) give them golf balls to sit on.
Birds go through phases. Very broody for a few months, then disinterested, then back to broody, eating eggs for a while, ignoring them, etc.
They do give up shortly after some eggs hatch, what is a problem if you mix eggs with different maturity.
Some hens learn to eat the uncollected eggs, what is also a problem because they don't know beforehand what eggs will hatch either, and start eating them at random.
If the eggs are left there, some animal will inevitably come and eat them. What is also a problem, because they will learn there are eggs there, and will not care to only look for abandoned ones.
Overall, it's not healthy to not collect the unfertilized eggs.
Looking at our 20 hens, they typically ignore them once they have been laid.
The only exception to this is if the hen has become broody, then they will sit on them virtually 24 hours a day trying to hatch them. The chickens become very docile when they're broody.
that's interesting, I always got the feeling that hens were more aggressive when broody. When one of my family's chickens was broody, I made chirping noises after forcing her out of her nesting box, and she made a loud clucking noise and charged at me (I assume because she thought I had her chicks)
Birds are surprisingly complex biological factories - especially the bits of their internal 'production line' which rotate the egg-to-be to twist membranes into shock-absorber-like suspension structures for the yolk.
This is the first time I've ever raised layers though 20 years ago as a teenager, my brother and I raised 100 birds every spring for the family freezer.
An interesting thing about the young chicks, even at 3 days old they were acting exactly like adult birds- making dust baths, establishing a pecking order and even attempting to roost though the only thing elevated in their box is their feeder.