FREE-RANGE CHICKENS
(Page 6 of 9)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
I'm asked if we lose many chickens to foxes or poisonous plants or poachers. Not that I know of. There's an annual attrition rate of about 10%, but I've never had a bird jes' disappear—or maybe I've never noticed it. (With a dozen or two chickens around, I don't take a bed check.) In time, hens die of natural causes like everything else, and I've never done an autopsy. One rooster came in last summer all chewed up—evidence of an animal attack. I dabbed gentian violet horse medicine on the worst rips and tears. He moped around the coop for two or three days and recovered fully, sans only his tail, which was bitten clean off; he's now a certified "bobtailed" rooster. Every so often an old bird just gets logy and goes over to a corner of the coop, sits down, and closes her eyes. If she doesn't recover enough to begin moving around in a day or two, she'll get unpleasant to be around, so I put her out of all our misery and bury her deep under the compost. (This is an individual, now. If symptoms of any sort show up in more than one bird, I go to Merck, quick.) There are always a few hens that decide to raise a fall brood and molt in November; sometimes one won't feather out in time for deep winter. Once in a while we have broken wings or legs, which really can't be mended in adult chickens and are occasion for an unscheduled coq au vin.
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Fully beaked and spurred, our feisty half-wild birds have enough space to roam in and enough natural fiber to eat so that they don't often peck one another to the point of injury (a recurring problem in overcrowded factory flocks). Sometimes they'll go after shiny new blood spots on a hen receiving so much attention from the roosters that she's gotten defeathered and scratched where her suitors have sunk their claws into her shoulders or their beaks into the back of her head. Gentian violet goes on the sore spots, and if the pecking continues, I'll cage the hen for a week or so ... keeping her inside the coop so she'll retain social status, if not freedom.
Replacement Birds
With field-run, well-roostered hens, there's no need to buy chickens after the first batch. Right now, my daughter Martha has two dozen eggs within a few days of hatching in an old fish aquarium turned incubator. We also have cooperative hens. At least one of the purebred Rhode Island Reds will stay afield nights for part of May and into June, usually unnoticed, as she comes around all the time to get food and water. Then one day Doctor Feel-Good, Martha's strawberry roan gelding, will start prancing and blowing out both ends at the pasture gate, and there's Old Red Hen with a dozen yellow chicks steadily ripping off his grain.
Supplementary Feed:
Grow It or Buy It?
Now comes the real crunch: deciding on a proper mix of bought versus wild versus home-raised poultry feed. My figures show that field-running a flock of domestic poultry reduces its consumption of dry feed by half. Maybe by a little more, but not much. I suppose I could withold dry feed and they'd work harder in the field, but I'm quite sure that their health would suffer and egg production would cease. But how best to provide the feed to supplement what the birds can forage on their own?
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