Caution! Being a chicken parent is not all that it's made out to be. Do you want to start an egg farm in your backyard? In Chicken Rearing 101, the funny and brutal truths of life as a small-time chick wrangler are looked at.
A chick is a baby bird.
Capon: A castrated male that is used for meat. (How much money could that bring in?)
A pullet is a young hen that is less than a year old.
A hen is a female chicken older than a year.
A rooster is a male chicken that is older than a year.
It can be scary to raise chickens for the first time. I tried to sound like a pro when I first called the Feed Shop. I asked, "Do you sell pullets?" "Yes," said the man. "Are all of them women?" Since then, it's been hard to make progress.
Raising a pullet is a lot like raising a child, except that it makes more poop per pound of body weight. But I've been reading a lot about chickens lately. (Yes, my coolness just died and went to hell.) So, if I'm right, which I'm pretty sure I'm not, here's how you raise chickens.
Go to the feed store near you and spend $10 on chicks and $50 on food and supplies. Don't forget to bring the water coolers. Always buy the metal ones and never the plastic ones. I haven't seen one made of metal yet.
Next, put the chicks somewhere safe, like a closet in a bedroom. Throw in some straw or wood shavings, which are very flammable, and hang a heat lamp just above them. Make a note to update your homeowner's insurance.
For the next few weeks, give them 3 pounds of food every day and take 4 pounds of trash out of the closet every day. Even though it doesn't make sense, birds get bigger. As soon as the adult feathers appear, cut off one of their wings. One for each bird, not just one wing in total. If you wait too long to cut your grass, chicks will nest in your toilet. This is not good.
To clip, you can throw your scissors and your whole body into the big pile of chicks, poop, and straw. Grab a moving, chirping bird from the pile of vomit. Hold it back with one hand. Use your other hand to spread out the wing. With your third hand, cut off half of the top ten feathers on each wing.
As the birds get bigger, turn down the heat light by one degree per day. No, this can't really happen. That's not what I mean. You start at 100 degrees for hatchlings and go down by one degree every day until your bedroom is at least three degrees cooler than the spring blizzard outside your window.
Once you've frozen your ear to your semi-cannibalistic down pillow and the chicks have grown their adult feathers, you can move them outside to the coop. I think the first stage of closet rearing took about five years.
Try the Joy of Wing Clipping one more time before you move. The first time you try to clip a feather, it never works. Why? No one knows. Still, you probably don't want them to leave in less than a minute after all the trouble. If you're like me, you might want to pack them each a lunch and leave a stack of Greyhound tickets by the open coop gate at this point.
When it comes to building hen houses and chicken coops, this is an art form. There are many websites that show off different kinds of architecture, from Chicken Chateaus to Bird Bordellos. My own house looks like a chicken coop because of how carefully it was made.
Shabby chic is always in style, so I chose it for my coop. The nesting boxes are a mismatched collection of stolen milk crates stuck to the wall with whatever was handy. As for the coop itself, I don't know how to make tight chicken wire. Honestly, my first attempt at building a coop looks like Dr. Seuss took some acid, turned on Jefferson Starship, and rolled around on the wire with every Who in Whoville. I'm going to keep it.
Even though the design was bad, I learned a few things in the end. The nesting boxes should be higher than the ground. That's right. For those of you keeping track, you just spent two weeks cutting back the birds' flight feathers so you could hang their homes in the sky. It's disgusting.
You are to build a roost higher than the nest boxes. This is where the birds go to the bathroom at night so they don't do it on your eggs in the morning. The roost is usually on top of the nesting boxes, so don't use those plastic milk crates with holes in them.
Keep a heat light on in the hen house for the young birds. Then, when it gets cooler at night, an animal with a brain the size of a bulimic's toenail clipping will decide to skip your nest boxes, skip the natural place to sleep, and jump into a tanning bed.
Lastly, there is the feeding schedule. I talked to a few experts and also read up on feeding. Make sure to give your chickens starter formula, mash, growth formula, start & grow, brood formula, grit, no grit, scraps, no scraps, goat placenta, nothing from the internet, tetramyacn, no antibiotics, medicated starter, non-medicated starter, and never switch between the two.
Even though I'm not yet Queen of the Coop, I'm working on it. I'm still a zoologist, and I still know the basics of birds. I can help with these two myths. First, you do not need a rooster to get eggs. Most people, even those who have never had chickens, will give you advice about them. Each will say you need a rooster for a while so he can be a man and do his job, and then you can put him in the pot. Even though this idea is appealing, your pot is a different story.
Roosters are only used to make eggs that can be fertilised. To make eggs for breakfast, you only need hens. Fertile eggs are great if raising chicks the first time was so much fun that you want to do it all over again. Also, there is always the chance that you will crack open a fertilised egg and find a half-formed chick foetus on your hot pan. Yum! The next step will be years of therapy.
To help you remember, think about this: You are living your life. All of a sudden, big balls of calcium start piling up in your stomach. Will you keep them just because you haven't had sex in a while?
The second bird myth has nothing to do with the first, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. Penguins live in the wild south of the Equator. That has to do with Antarctica, not the Arctic! No, they don't hang out with Polar Bears who live in the Arctic. No, you did not see them when you worked in Alaska and the Arctic. That was a puffin. No, I don't feel bad that you made everyone you told penguin stories to look stupid.
Yes, some species of penguins live on the Galapagos Islands, which are near the equator. They don't live on icebergs or in the Arctic, though, because the cold would kill them. Yes, I know I don't have all my eggs in one basket. People who think you need a rooster to fertilise your penguin eggs so that polar bears don't run out of food drove me crazy.
