The Chicken Palace
July 30th, 2007 - Posted in chickens - by Sarah|
30th July 2007
Our Light Sussex chooks (Australasian for chickens) have really settled in here in their fantabulous chicken palace.
The chicken palace.
We costed up the chicken house that we wanted to build and discovered that we could buy one for about the same price. It came in about 6 very large and heavy pieces that we manhandled down to the area we’d designated for the initial chicken run and assembled. It has been much admired by both lots of neighbours who have the more common chicken wire, old tin and pallet style of chicken house.
It certainly seems to be appreciated by the chickens as they’re already laying lots of eggs again. The eggs had tailed off as the days grew shorter. Chickens rely on daylight hours to know when they should be laying or not. Only one hen carried on laying until about a week before the shortest day. She’s affectionately known as Fatty as she went through a phase in the autumn when she looked much bigger than the others. This was probably why she was able to keep laying longer.
For this reason we would try to make sure that we breed from her but in addition to being the best layer she is also the most stupid of the lot of them. As a recent example of this we have added a short gate to their run. This is so that the chickens can get in and out when they want to but the Wekas can’t get in to steal their eggs. This gate is just above head height on a chicken and about a third of the height of the roosting poles they leap onto every night to sleep. All of the chickens happily hop over it except Fatty who paces back and forth along the fence trying to find an entrance. She has even been found at dusk, when the others have already tucked themselves up for the night, standing on top of the nesting boxes (also about 3 times as high as the gate) trying to get into the run. So maybe we won’t go out of our way to incubate any of her eggs…
All of her eggs should now be fertile due to the arrival of Ahab.
Have you seen the whale?.
A couple of months ago we went along to the West Coast Poultry Club annual show. Through the deafening crowing and clucking noises we managed to ask someone if any of the birds were for sale. We were directed to a notebook at the front desk where we wrote down our names and phone number and our request for a Light Sussex Cockerel. A few days later we got a call from a woman who had won all the prizes for Sussex at the show (we think that she was the only entrant). She didn’t have a Cockerel available but did have a Rooster she would be willing to part with once the 2007 show season was over.
?That sounds great? I said and hurried away to look at my chicken books to find out the difference. In case you’re interested a rooster is over 2 years old. Ahab settled in fast although the chickens looked a bit shell-shocked for a few days. He looks after them in a manner astonishingly similar to a mother hen looking after chicks. He’s always on the look-out for tasty morsels and when he finds some he makes a high pitched staccato noise that has them all running up to him. He always lets them eat first and only tucks in when he’s sure that there’s enough. The noise he makes is so appealing that the neighbours on our West have started shutting their chickens away as they all come running through and under the fence and leave a short while later fully fertilised!
We’re hoping that one of our hens decides to go broody soon so that we can start increasing our flock and eating chicken a bit more often. More on that soon…
The flock ? July 2007.
