Chicken-n-Veg

We returned from a two week holiday in France to the the sad news that Snowdrop, one of our two Amber Lee hens (bought last year at point of lay) had died. She hadn’t been obviously ill before we went away and no problems were spotted by our friends and family looking after the hens while we were away. She was still keenly running up for food earlier on the day she died but was missing that evening. After a search she was found dead, behind a tree at the back of their run, with no outward signs of injury. We don’t really know the cause, but at the moment all of our other hens seem happy and healthy.

She will be missed. She had been claimed (and named) by our daughter as "her hen" and was certainly the most friendly. She was happy to be picked up by anyone and would follow us and "jump up" to help whenever we cleaned out the hen house.

The number of hens we now have is still seven, the same as it was a month ago, as we actually acquired another one a week before we went on holiday. A neighbour bought round a stray hen she found wandering in her garden, thinking it was one of ours that had absconded. We both tried to locate  the owner, asking around the local area, and in the meantime we agreed to look after her. A number of houses nearby border open fields, which means the possible area she could have escaped from was quite large.

I’m not sure of the breed but I believe she is a hybrid like our other hens. She is quite young but has started laying. She was definitely bottom of the pecking order and for the first week was being bullied by all the others. We did our best to minimise this, but she still spent most of her time hiding in the chicken coop or under bushes. She now has a small bare patch at the top of her neck where the other hens plucked / pecked her (luckily no blood was drawn !) We were thinking we would have to separate her before we went on holiday, but the bullying suddenly stopped and she now seems to have fully integrated with the others. She may get the occasional half-hearted peck in her direction, but no more than is directed towards the other hens that are lower in the pecking order.

As we have still not identified her owner, almost a month later, it seems likely that we will end up looking after her and our daughter has decided to name her Maisy.

Flora, one of our two Amber Lee hens has been broody for about 2 weeks. This is apparently not common for a hybrid hen, but she was also our only broody hen last year, when she was only about 28 weeks old. We were unable to break her broody cycle last year and have not had much more success this year. We have tried a number of things as recommended on the hen keeping forums we visit, but she is very persistent. On one of the days we shut her our of the nest box for the whole day. She spent all day pacing around, crowing loudly and as soon as we opened the henhouse up in the evening she jumped straight back onto her "nest" (even though there are no eggs there). Due to the loud crowing (we don’t want to fall out with our neighbours) and its lack of success, we probably won’t try this again.

Her behaviour is certainly disruptive. She fluffs up and starts pecking anything that disturbs her. The other hens have stopped laying in the nest boxes and have made alternative nests in a large Pampas grass plant. The combination of the broody hen and several hens that have started moulting means that we are currently only getting 2-3 eggs a day from our seven hens. Hopefully this picks up soon as we can more than keep up with this paltry (or should that be poultry !) amount.

Sadly Isabella (one of our three ex-battery hens) died this week. The vet diagnosed peritonitis and unfortunately she did not respond to treatment (Baytril antibiotic). We can take some solace in the fact that she had enjoyed more than a year of freedom after spending her first year or so in a battery farm cage.

I have recently been working on a DIY gadget to allow remote monitoring of the status of the leisure battery which powers our electric chicken fence. Usually the first warning that the battery is getting flat is a red warning light on the fence energiser. By the time we see this it is normally too late and the fence is not being powered at an effective voltage. This is not an ideal situation, with foxes visiting our garden most nights. The idea of the remote monitor is that it will always give an accurate reading of the battery voltage, that can conveniently be checked from inside the house and can sound an alarm if it drops below a predefined threshold. It will also give an indication if the electric fence is actually switched on. There is a switch for the fence that we use to power it down when entering the run to collect eggs, etc. Unfortunately it is all too easy to forget to turn the fence back on when finished. Without going back outside it is often not possible to see if the fence is on or off. The energiser does have a light that flashes green when the the fence is powered, but this is not really visible during the day. As an additional feature the outside temperature is also monitored. To be honest a large part of doing the design was as a challenge to do something different and interesting during the winter evenings. But I do still think it will be a very useful tool to have.

I have now produced a fully working prototype. It consists of two units. A transmitter unit that sits near the bottom of the garden, connected to the battery, monitoring and regularly transmitting its readings. A second unit in the  house receives the data from the transmitter and displays the status on a small 16×2 LCD display. Both modules are based around an Arduino Duemilanove microprocessor board. The Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. There are plenty of free resources available that make the Arduino platform an easy introduction to microprocessor development. The Duemilanove is the latest revision of the basic Arduino USB board. It connects to a computer with a standard USB cable and contains everything else to program and use the board. For the wireless link I used low cost 433MHz AM Transmitter and Receiver modules. With a couple of home made antennas the indoor receiver unit can reliably receive data from the outdoor transmitter when separated by more than 40m (and a window).

To finish off the design and get it into daily use I just have to box the two modules (including a weatherproof box for the outside unit). I also need to ruggedize the antennas and have a couple of minor hardware and software tweaks that I would like to implement. In the spirit of the open source Arduino platform that the  design is based around, I am happy to share my design. If anyone is interested drop me an email (on the Contact Us page) and  I will write up the project and provide a link on this site to any support files I have. I am sure that the general design could be used for numerous general purpose remote monitoring or control applications. With small software changes, for instance, the receiver could support multiple transmitter modules.

We took advantage of the good weather over the weekend to move the chickens run. After a very cold, wet autumn and winter their run was looking very worn. Moving them should give it time to recover before we move them back again, sometime in early spring.  We put their electric fence round some different, interesting features for them to explore, including 9 of our raised beds and some trees and bushes for cover. So far they seem very happy with new surroundings, and are loving scratching for food in the beds. We are hoping they will also help us by weeding, digging and fertilising these beds over the next few months, till we need to use them again.

A couple of days ago we had the first real snow of winter and since then the temperature has hardly crept above freezing. The garden is looking very wintery. I don’t envy the hens though. They had never seen any snow before this week and were not very keen to check it out on the first morning. Last night the temperature dropped below -9 Celsius and actually froze their automatic pop hole so they were shut in till we let them out. We’d better make sure it doesn’t freeze open at night ! I’m impressed by how hardy they are and they are still typically laying 5 eggs per day. They will need to be hardy though, as the sub zero temperatures are forecast to continue for the next week or so.

The wet weather we’ve had in the last month or so has brought surprisingly swift end to our work in the garden for this year. Weeks of rain have taken their toll and there are many jobs that we haven’t been able to finish. The last proper outdoor task that we did complete, was to prune our fruit trees at the end of October. Since then, however, we have not been really been able to do anything. We totally failed to plant out garlic or broad beans, or dig in manure and cover up the unused beds for winter. More work for next year, I guess !

The natural soil in our garden is clay so all the rain meant large puddles of standing water all over the lawn making any real garden work impossible. There was also quite a lot of standing water in the chickens run which they quickly turned into a mud bath. We had to rearrange their run to avoid the muddy pools and so far their new area is relatively clean.

Last weekend Snowdrop, one of our younger hens and certainly the most friendly and lively, became very withdrawn. She was clearly feeling very poorly and just stood under a tree, away from the other hens, with her head down. She was not interested in any of the food we offered, which was extremely unusual. We checked for all the obvious hen problems but could not find anything (she wasn’t egg bound, had no lice, had a clean vent, no sign of being crop bound, her eyes were clear, no respitory problems, etc.). We managed to get her into our local vets as soon as they opened on Monday. I was very impressed with their service. They seemed very knowlegeable and the consultation and treatment was less than £10.

Apparently Snowdrop’s temperature was "off the scale" and the vet diagnosed an infection of some sort. He put her on a 7 day course of Baytril antibiotics. We had to give this to her twice a day, mixed with some water, using  a small syringe (not easy the first few times !). He also recommended keeping her away from the other hens to limit the chance of cross infection. Additionally, as Baytril is not licensed for hens, he said that we should not consume any of her eggs until at least 10 days after the end of treatment.

Our temporary quarantine solution is to bring her in to the house in the evenings and put her to roost in a carboard box, with a makeshift litter tray and perch. Then in the mornings we place her in quite a large sectioned off area of the run (quite easy to do with moveable electric netting), so she can see the other hens. She doesn’t seem to mind this and after only 5 days of treatment she’s eating and drinking properly again and seems to be back to her normal, lively self.

With autumn well and truly upon us, I decided to spend a little bit of time this weekend constructing a wellington boot stand. The idea of the stand is that it is positioned just outside the back door. Instead of muddy wellies being brought into the house, they are removed outdoors, and are placed upside down on the stand. They can stay outside, on the stand, in all weather and the inside of the boots won’t get wet.

The stand didn’t cost anything to make as it only used materials I already had (old fence posts, scraps of wood and reclaimed screws). Less than an hours work, a quick coat of non-toxic wood preserver, and hey presto, one ‘rustic’ (ie. it looks homemade), but very useful welly stand.