Cluckingham Palace [from iPhone]

Who's The Fairest Of Them All? [from iPhone]

A Medicated Cobweb [from iPhone]

Lock Up Ya Chooks

The MetOffice says minus 10 tonight! With this in mind, here's a few cold weather chicken tip courtesy of our good friends at the Battery Hen Welfare Trust.

• If you have the space/facilities, it may be worth waiting until dark tonight, putting the hens in a cardboard box/crate and moving them to an indoor area such as a porch, garage or utility room for the night.
• If that is not possible, then you can cover their coop overnight with carpet, blankets, bubble wrap or flattened cardboard to give them extra insulation.
• If you have just a few girls in a large coop/stable or converted shed, it may be worth putting a large cardboard box, half filled with chopped straw/wood shavings, on its side within the coop. After dark, go in and put them all togther in the box, this should ensure that they are sharing body warmth tonight.
• Smearing their combs with Vaseline will help prevent frostbite.
• Drinkers will freeze overnight (and some may split if you leave them out and try to defrost them in the morning), so bring them in each night to thaw in a sink and fill them each morning with warm water (which they love). Check the drinkers again during the day to ensure they havent frozen up.
• Give your hens extra corn in the afternoon as this reputedly will heat them up internally as they digest it overnight.
• You can also give them a hot breakfast, anything from layers mash mixed with hot water, warm scrambled eggs, mashed potato, warm sultanas, rice, pasta etc.
• Do make sure the hens have some shelter in their run, the wind chill can be very uncomfortable for them. Putting up some boards / tarpaulin again the windward side of their run will help.

Ours are all safe and warm in the outhouse, with a radiator.

Seperating Cobweb

Poor little Cobweb really is at the bottom of the pecking order. So much so, the other 2 have pecked a hole in her bum and we've had to seperate her from them.

Amazingly, hens are oftern attracted to pecking at red (as well as shiney things) and so once a chicken is bleeding it's potentailly an ongoing and self perpetuating thing. Seperating her was our number 1 priority, while making sure she could still see the others and they could see her for security and her own piece of mind (this is an ex-battery hen let's not forget, used to being in close proximity toother chooks). We've added, as you can see in the picture, a temporay annex to Cluckingham Palace, made out of old rabbit pen. We gave her bum a squirt of 'Savlon Wound Wash' to be on the safe side, then sound advice from hitting the forums runs thus: "Gentian violet or purple spray (available at most livestock stores and online). Spray this on the red featherless areas of the hens. This tastes bad for them and removes the sight of red which seems to attract them." She's now sleeping seperatly from them too, in the outhouse in a cat basket. Lets keep our fingers crossed.

She seemed to have a lot more confidence this morning, and is eating fine. Maybe this is just what she needs to catch up with the other 2 who are 'free-ranging' like they were born to it and eating there way through the herb garden happily. A few more feathers and a bit of TLC and we've high hopes for her.

Merry Christmas Everyone! [from iPhone]

Twittering & Pecking Order

The girls are a teeny bit more confident today, especially Mustardseed who's full of beans and clucking away this morning, and they're starting to sort out the pecking order (which was kinda obvious from the start).

Heading off to work, but left them out in the coop to peck around the bottom of the pen and encouraged Cobweb out of the nesting box to grab some grub.

Another 2 eggs this morning. One more, and that's boiled eggs and toasty soldiers for @SparklyJem (the good lady wife) and I tomorrow. Oh, and if you want to keep up on the chooks you can follow my twitter at @Lactose or the Big Green Switch twitter at @BigGreenSwitch

I was amazed to find my good mate Sian from our favourite green site has also set-up a Facebook group for the BGSChooks, so you join for updates and progress reports. I'd love to see some pics of other peoples chickens over there too, and hear your tips and suggestions :-)

Unhinged Chickens

Okay, I learnt something this afternoon. Something I've not seen in any books or on the web.

I added a hinge to the ramp, a brass one, so that I could hook the ramp up to the top of the coop by a bit of string once we move them up onto the grass in a day or so (they are only where they are temporarily while they are getting used to the place). You need to move them around every 2-3 days and I thought this would be a cunning way of stopping the ramp catching on the ground every time.

Mustardseed and Peasblossom caught one look at this hinge and spent the next hour pecking at it like pneumatic hammers. "Oooh, shiney thing". It was borderline neurosis before I got a chance to cover it up with a bit of black gaffer tape and all returned to calm. Cobweb would have probably have joined in too if she wasn't still an agoraphobic wreck at the back of the nest box (though I did get her to eat some corn out of my hand earlier).

Anyway, and this was news to me, chickens are attracted to shiny objects - If an egg gets broken they will start pecking at it, and eventually eat it. Apparently, for some hens, once they get a taste of eggs they start breaking eggs to eat them. It can be a hard habit to break. Interesting that, as I was also told egg shells were good for them as a food/calcium/grit source for making new eggs.

I'll let you know any changes later, but for now all's quiet in the coop.

Enough Said! [from iPhone]

Now that's a good start!

The Big Day

Well, coop filled with straw etc. and off we went. Up bright and early, Smart Car packed with a homemade cardboard chook carrier, we set off for Allesley, Nr. Coventry, for today's Battery Hen Welfare Trust collection.

Big thanks to Ian and Mollie (lovely people) for showing us around, introducing us to the rescue turkeys, and to all the guys and girls helping out on the day.

These people do awesome work and I can't recommend getting your chickens this way high enough. Well worth the wait. This was like a big friendly military operation, and by the time we arrived there were only a hundred or so left for collection.

I'm proud to say we won a special comment for 'best made box' of the day ;-)

Handily, they also had feeders and water thingys for sale, basic layers mash (this is the dusty stuff they are fed on and used to, you have to wean them off this at first) and loads of free constructive advice (just the stuff you need to know, and where to find out the rest).

We picked up a couple of tags (leg rings too) so we could name them properly like the poll on the Big Green Switch website:

• Cobweb (green tag, on the right in the picture) is the most 'oven ready' looking and very nervous. She's very agoraphobic so far. She'll need the most care.
  
• Mustardseed (red tag, on the left of the pic) is the toughest and fluffiest and is showing signs of being a good forager already. She's going to rule the roost.
  
• Peasblossom (purple tag) is kinda middle of the road, a bit bald in places but sweet and quite curious. I think she'll be fine.
  

As you can see in the picture they seem to like their new coop. It's been a long day and already it's nearly time for them to roost. We'll see more of them tomorrow. We've wrapped a hot water bottle up in a towel and Cobweb is sat on it right now. Fingers crossed. I'm very glad we were able to give these girls a new lease of life :-)