Release The Chickens! No! Wait! Get Them Back!!

I have to start by saying I totally love my chickens.  Not in the "diaper them and let them roam the house" kind of way (and yes there are people out there who do that) but in the "I am raising my own meat and eggs and they are fabulous fertilizers, bug patrol and entertainment" kind of way.  We have been raising chickens for probably 5 years now and I think we have a decent handle on how they act and what they need.  But I got myself into trouble the other day because we were entirely to excited about letting them free range.

We have two flocks currently.  Our layers and then our chicks which are mostly for meat (save for 7 which will be kept for breeding purposes).  The chicks were living in a chicken tractor that we have used for the last two years and were doing ok, but things were starting to get cramped.  I hadn't made it to fit 30 large birds in (even if they are only 12 weeks old).  When Forest and I got back on this permaculture horse we started wondering why we weren't letting them free range.  I mean, they can do it, right?  And they will be happier and healthier and we wont have to move the tractor twice a day.

Our brilliant plan was to move them over to the garden, about 50 feet away from where the tractor currently was resting.  Forest heaved and hoed to move them all the way over (because of it's location we had to go around a bunch of things and wood and tin doesn't make for the lightest of tractors).  Once there we opened it up and sat and watch as the chicks slowly discovered that they could get out, and the wonders that awaited them outside.

All this happened in the morning, and it was fun to watch them range all over the yard.  We would come outside and they would come running.  Like a loving dog or something.  They had great fun, as did we.  Little did we know the best was yet to come.

After the kids where in bed and it was starting to get dark, forest and I went out to check on them and make sure they were back in the tractor.  Unfortunately, for us, they were everywhere but the tractor.  "Oh yeah!"  I suddenly remembered, "We haven't let them be in one spot long enough to know where their home is.  They have no idea how to get back to the tractor!"  Most of the birds had congregated in the area where the tractor had been that morning.  They were looking around, completely confused, and it was starting to get dark.

Forest and I spent 45 minutes, luring, herding, capturing, yelling, banging pots and chasing those chickens up the road and down and through the lilac bushes and around the chicken tractor and through the 6 foot tall weeds.  I had our youngest on my back the whole time and was in a dress and Forest was out in his boxers.  Oh what a sight we were!  Eventually we got a system down where we herded them from opposite directions and then Forest would pounce and I would carry whoever was caught back to the tractor.  The last five were in the lilac bushes (and by "bushes" I mean 15 feet tall, by 15 feet wide, by about 30 feet long) and we somehow managed to get them all into one place so we could catch and then take them home.  Forest got bit and scratched quite a few times from the bushes and the mosquitoes were eating us all alive.  But in the end, the chickens were safe and sound and we could still laugh about it.

Upon finally coming back inside I reflected on all the things I had learned, and remembered, about chickens:

• Chickens have to know where their home is, before they can come back to it.  Letting them out so soon after moving them had been a bad move.
• Chickens are hard to herd and hard to catch with a baby on your back
• It's highly entertaining and rewarding to talk with chickens (They seemed quite happy when I was carrying them back to the tractor and thanked me for it)
• Chickens cry.  Not with tears, but more like a dog will whine.  As it was getting dark and they were trying to find a place to roost, we were chasing them and they were tired, they would cry this sad little sound that was weird but rather moving.
• Next year we're making a chicken tractor big enough to comfortable house the birds we get and made out of pvc so it can be moved easier.
• A free ranging chicken is a beautiful thing, as long as it know where to got to bed and be safe at night.

The next two days we kept the chicks in the tractor and moved it around in the garden area and then finally moved them into the main chicken yard with the other flock.  It took a little while to establish a pecking order, but they all seem to be interacting really well.  It's cramped in there right now.  There are nearly 60 chickens in there total, but we will be butchering about half of them in the next couple of weeks.

Ah life with chickens.  There is never a dull moment!