The Urban Farmer's Almanac

We are leaving town for a few days over Thanksgiving, and, assuming it would be tricky to line up a chicken-sitter who would come over at 7 am and let them out, and then back at 5 to close the coop door, I am working on some improvements to the chicken coop. As you may remember, we got a little lax on security and it didn’t end well for our last pair of hens. So now we’ve been diligently locking them in the coop every night, but it kind of seems mean to leave them in there for 4 days. It’s a pretty small coop (the size of a big dog house, maybe), and it doesn’t get much light.

So I’m trying to make an enclosed area that gives them outdoor access but also keeps them safe from cougars and racoons.

I also installed a motion-sensing light outside, so hopefully anything sneaking around there at night will get a blast of light in their eyes and get scared off. (I have cooled off from my original “racoon poison” Google searches.)

I also installed a heat lamp in their coop. I have heard different opinions on lamps — they keep them warm (even though they all snuggle together when they sleep), the light encourages them to lay eggs in the winter… I don’t know if it’s necessary or not. Tonight was going to be the first night with it on, but after some online reading, I went out and turned it off. I think I need to switch to a red bulb if nothing else; who can sleep with a big bright light shining in your face? Or maybe I’ll try just setting the timer to run from 4 – 7 at night, or maybe 5 – 7 am? Anybody have any ideas?

It looks tight, but it keeps them safe.

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Clipping the chicken's wings

The second night we had our new chickens, Alicia went out to close the coop door and keep them safe from predators. They still hadn’t quite figured out their new home, so two of them were sitting on the floor, rather than the nice nesting boxes I had built for them. The other two were nowhere to be seen, but the peeping of young chickens was coming from somewhere. Following her ears, Alicia found two of them roosting on top of the 6-foot fence.

When there’s dirty work to be done — in this case wing-clipping — it is passed on to me. The next day around lunchtime, I rounded up the chickens one by one and clipped off the big feathers from one of their wings. I was able to walk up and just grab the first one, but by the time I got to chicken #4, she gave me a real run for my money. They get really smart about using the chicken coop to hide under, around, and through. Plus they’re pretty quick when they want to be.

The theory is that clipping only one wing throws off their balance so they can’t fly straight, and thus, can’t “fly the coop.” When the first chicken hopped off my lap after her wing-clipping, she gave a couple big flaps and landed with a thud on her side on the ground, so I think it worked.

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I was expecting to get to write a bunch of light-hearted posts about canning and our cider pressing party and making sauerkraut and all the other things we’re up to, since, as Alicia says so well, we like to pretend we’re farmers. The parts of farming that we don’t really do are all the hard parts. We don’t rely on any of this stuff, it’s more like a hobby or entertainment.

But, this morning I looked outside and wondered if the chickens were cold; I certainly was inside the house. I didn’t see anything so I went out to look. It’s hard to describe the feeling: the chickens were gone and there were grey feathers all over the place. It was like I got punched in the stomach. Was it a racoon? I’ve heard they would do something like this.

After looking around the yard and walking around the block, I don’t know much. I am almost positive that Gray Chicken is gone, but I don’t see many brown feathers, so Brown Chicken might have escaped and found a place to hide. Holding out hope that she’s around somewhere, but for now I just feel pretty bummed.

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Grey Chicken after she came home.

When your chicken goes missing in Seattle, you put up signs. Turns out she had only made it as far as the neighbor’s yard, but it took us half a day to figure that out.

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