FREE-RANGE CHICKENS
(Page 2 of 9)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
Before field-running your own chickens, be sure that quail, pheasant, turkeys, grouse, prairie chickens—or any other member of the chicken's avian family of gallinaceous birds—live wild in the area, or did before civilization struck. The Galliformes comprise an order of largely dry-ground-feeding birds; we call the barnyard birds' typical food gathering habit scratching, If any Galliformes from quail- to turkey-size are indigenous to your area, chickens ought to find a good supply of native food in your woods, too. If all you have in the way of local birds are pigeons and English sparrows, though, you'd best wait till you can get farther out into God's own country. Chickens will eat most anything that grows, but not much grows on asphalt.
RELATED CONTENT
A beginner's guide to raising rabbits, including a rabbit barn, pens, feeders and waterers, breedin...
Country Lore: How you can keep all your fresh eggs for winter use....
Country Lore: A helpful hint on detecting rooster eggs...
Tests show free-range eggs are more nutritious and have half the cholesterol of supermarket eggs....
Mother's staff experimented with various methods of storing eggs with no refrigeration and for a lo...
Remember, Chickens Have Been Domesticated for Centuries
Bear in mind that, kin to native quail and grouse or not, a domestic chicken is about as well designed for a life of hardy self-reliance in the wild as a gorgeous, doe-eyed jersey cow. Both have been hand bred by humans for aeons to convert ground corn into "people food," not to fight the elements or live on bugs and weed seed in a lean 'n' mean existence.
A hen needs all the water she can drink and the equivalent of about a half cup of whole grain to produce the 50 calories and 5 grams of protein in each egg she lays ... plus another half cup or so of grain each day to sustain herself. She'll find a lot of feed and fluid over a day's foraging on bugs, seeds, berries, and nibbles of plants that occur naturally during growing season on most fairly open North American landscapes. But nature didn't plan a menu to support gallinaceous birds everywhere. The deep evergreen woods of Wisconsin, a salt marsh along the Oregon coast, Rocky Mountain high meadowland, a clean-aired dry butte in Arizona, and any number of other habitats may be glorious places for people to live and grow gardens. However, in these places chickens must be fully subsidized. Even if you are surrounded by teeming hordes of grouse and pheasant, unless you want to run charming but unproductive little bantams or experiment with food production of exotic chickens (bred originally for show, and closer to native strains in feeding and nesting behavior if not in appearance), plan to supplement the native forage 365 days a year. More on that later.
Getting Birds
If there were only one piece of advice I could offer a novice poultry-keeper, this would be it: Start out with hatchery poultry, even if you have to pay a dollar a head and save up to have the cash on hand. With experience, you will be able to tell good birds from bad. But too many first-timers buy a flock from some suburbanite who advertises in the paper—usually a "wanta-be" homesteader who's gotten tired of daily chores—and import someone else's problems onto their own places. I learned this indirectly years ago. Mel and Sweet Jan got themselves a flock of laying-age leghorns free for the hauling. Within a week, the birds' putty white plumage was blowing around the farmyard. Fell out from a plague of feather mites, someone suggested, most likely contracted unbeknownst to anyone from pigeons freeloading in the birds' former pen near town. But here was this shiny-new country couple, maybe six weeks out of Boston, with a dozen sick chickens ... and all of them running around red and nekked and screeching, in helpless misery. (The chickens, I mean. Mel and Jan stayed decent, though troubled, through it all, so far as I know,)
Page:
<< Previous 1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
Next >>
