Look out. Cat!

This is a 7 day old chick.

Summer seemed to arrive today.

The heat made the chicks tired.

To help deal with the heat we gave them some watermelon.

They waited for Alice to try it first...

She then gave them the signal to enjoy!

Pippa rolled small pieces of watermelon in chick crumble which caused a stampede.

Chick crumble is a great staple food for young chicks. It does contain antibiotics though so it is important to prevent laying chooks from having access to it if you plan to eat the eggs.

They all cheeped as they ate, letting the late comers know they were missing out on something special.

The noise brought Simon across who paced the summer house door.  This is the first glimpse he has had of his babies. They carried on without showing much interest.

This was when Alice stopped, standing tall and perfectly still.  The chicks copied her in an instant but the problem wasn't Simon...

If you look right at the top of the image you will see why.  That black arc is the tail of Rummer – our spotted Bengal cat. You’ll meet him another day, he’s a very uncat-like cat. Please enjoy the photo -- it took 2.5hours to download it!

Today I promised Henny-Penny, so here she is…

The queen of the garden. It's not a great photo but it was such a hot day she didn't venture out past the deep shadows of the macadamia tree.

Henny-Penny eats first, gets the best dust bathing position and perches on the best roost.

She hangs around the backdoor in the morning to get the best leftovers.

Henny-Penny has lived in 3 states and for a while she lived with my brother but now she's back with us. I took her from Brisbane to Tullermarine airport in a dog crate (along with 5 other chooks).

A child at the airport peered into the crate and said, "It's a chicken". The child's mother pulled her away and saying, "Don't be so silly".

Henny-Penny hatches and raises chicks but the eggs aren’t hers – we cook with hers because they haven't been fertile for years. 

If I had known when she was a pullet that she would be still laying nearly every day when she was 8 years old I would have bred more chicks from her.

Meet the magnificent silver spangled Simon

This is a 6 day old chick.

I received a nice message today from the new owner of a little 6 week old flock we re-homed on Christmas Eve. They have a brand new coop and are settling in well.

She did mention clipping their wings as they are eyeing off the fence posts. It is important to only ever clip ONE wing.  The idea is to put them off balance by having unequal thrust.  Clipping two wings just means they’ll flap harder and still be able to fly.

Next time we’re clipping a wing I’ll take some photos to share – but today I promised Simon. 

Here he is, looking fabulous.

This is one of his feathers.  Silver spangled chooks have all white feathers with a black tip.

Yesterday the grass was cut from knee high to short so they are all a bit unsure of themselves today. 

After spending a few minutes doing his high pitched call and getting no response from his harem, Simon spent about an hour ferrying pieces of leftover spaghetti meat to each of the hens.

He always looks after Henny-Penny first.  She is one of my originals.  She is 8 years old and lays almost every day. 

Today we took the mother hen and 9 chicks on a mini summer holiday to Lakes Entrance.  Not ideal or practical but we did, so there you are.

The chicks benefited from being handled by new people.

In a new environment they also learnt to freeze perfectly still if there was a noise or movement they were unfamiliar with such as a larger bird flying overhead.

They take the lead from their mother she makes her body hard and still; and they somehow know to follow by doing the same. 

I’m not sure how this is done – there is not a noise she makes to alert them to danger.

Tomorrow I'll try to capture it on camera... and I'll be introducing the matriarch, Henny-Penny.

Day 5: Their world grows along with them

This is a 5 day old chick.

Today they went on a little trip to what we call the summer house. It’s actually just some old tomato stakes bound together boy scout-style with electrical tape then covered in what was once the trampoline safety net.

On this occasion the summer house lived up to its rather grand name as Lady Pippa came to visit.

It forms a tent-shaped shady area for the mother hen to begin an important lesson.

She scratches the ground, methodically, with her feet; starting in the corner and sweeping her way across the grass.

The chicks watch their mother very intently. It will be a few more days before they begin to mimic her scratching actions.

For now they take the tiny insects from her beak.

Mostly they take turns but a ‘pecking order’ is emerging and some of the more forthright chicks receive more than is strictly their share.

This is normal chook behaviour.  What chicks need to learn is to know where they fit into the order and to accept it.

Trouble only starts if one decides to challenge the order. You may read tips elsewhere about introducing new hens to flocks and how it can result in bloody confrontations – this isn’t normal.

In nature hens grow up living with the sisters they hatch alongside. In nature there would be no battle.

The pecking order would be established when the chicks are only a few days old when the potential for inflicting physical damage on one another (under the ever vigilant mother hen) is nil.

And if any of them ever overstep the boundaries Simon will remind them of where they really fit.  That reminds me – you still haven't met the fabulous Simon. Tomorrow I'll introduce you.

Here took, took, took

This is a 4 day old chick.

I love day 4. This is the day when chicks begin to eat properly and are much stronger. Until now they have mainly relied on the energy supplies from their yolk.

With human babies you have to wait a whole 4 or 6 months before you can feed them, depending on which Maternal Health Nurse you are randomly assigned or the results of the last World Health Organisation study.

This is my recipe for 10 chicks:

2 soft boiled eggs

2 fish oil capsules

A handful of quick rolled oats

1 teaspoon of spirulina powder (available in health food stores)

A sprinkle of flax seed (sold in the supermarket as linseed)

A sprinkle of fine shell grit

A torn up head of lavender

All ingredients are mashed well and served warm.

When I take any food to the chooks I call them saying, “Here took, took, took.”

I started doing this when I realised roosters have a special sound to call their girls when they find a tasty morsel to share. I have identified about 15 different sounds chooks use to communicate with one another.  There are probably more.

Mother hens start using them even before the eggs hatch. Quite a different experience to the hum of an incubator and much more useful for life in the garden.

Whatever is left of breakfast after two hours goes to the rooster for a job well done – I’ll introduce our stunning silver spangled Simon one day very soon.  He is the ultimate diplomat and will probably call his girls over to share the leftovers.

This nutrient dense breakfast is designed to introduce flavours you want the chicks to remember and seek out when they have grown into laying hens.

Lavender helps keep internal parasites under control.  Growing wormwood is also a healthy edition to the diet of your garden flock.

Linseed and fish oil boosts the level of Omega 3 in a chook’s egg yolks.

Shell grit is good for calcium, salts and establishes the chick’s digestion by helping it to grind food internally

Spirulina is a powerful antioxidant and if it’s good for healthy hair and nails in humans I figure it does wonders for growing feathers.

The obedient chicks form an orderly queue and wait for her to feed them from her beak.

After a while she selects small pieces and places it on the grass for the chicks to peck.

Being a chick seems to involve lots of standing in line!

With so many chicks this line turns into more of a continuous circle around Alice.

Some sooky chicks prefer to be fed beak to beak a little longer – usually roosters, like this one standing up to his ankles in breakfast but demanding that his mother feed him.

If you think this looks hectic, wait until tomorrow when they have energy to burn and plenty to learn.

What is this all about?

This is a 3 day old chick being introduced to the family.  Early frequent handling leads to calm, curious chooks that can become part of their 'forever home' family.

Earlier today I watched Alice catch mozzies and flies in her beak, then whenever a chick emerged from inside her feathery shroud she would feed it the dead insect. Sometimes she would hold it for more than ten minutes, waiting for a tiny hungry head to appear.

Which kind of gets me to the point of this blog...

While studying towards a Master of Sustainability I was busy weighing the food intake of chooks; examining the food preferences of different breeds; and counting and measuring egg output in an effort to determine which breed was the most sustainable.

While watching I discovered that chooks learn from one another!

The mothers 'teach' their chicks good or bad behaviours -- which they then pass on to their chicks.

Chicks hatched in incubators don't stand a chance. 

In fact now that I am aware of how social chooks are, I regard incubators as abuse. Chicks are churned out in their thousands and sent to live in gardens around Australia without ever having been near a mother hen.

Imagine handing over day old pups to their new owner saying, "Here's a bottle. Feed it a few times a day and it'll be right." It would never happen because we know puppies get more than milk from their mother.  They are taught how to behave; what is and isn't socially acceptable in dog circles; how to be cautious and recognise risks.

I hope through reading this blog over the coming months more people come to realise the same is true for chooks.

The little flocks I provide have been raised by mothers with good sustainable habits. In the first 6 weeks of life they work hard to pass those skills on to their chicks.

Here is a great mum, Salt & Pepper, giving a five week old dust bath lessons this morning.

She has shown this chick before but we have had a lot of rain so finding a patch of dry dirt was difficult. First she showed it how to push back the newspaper mulch.

Then they frolicked around in it for an hour.

Chooks can be taught much like dogs. Anyone with chooks knows they soon learn the sound of their food being prepared and dash towards it (I would not go so far as to say they salivate but Pavlov would have been proud of them).

So to make a more sustainable chook, my breeding program over the past eight years has involved selecting for behaviour rather than genetics.

I don't really care whether a hen's comb is the right shape or not according to the "standard" -- I care if that hen scratches the ground lightly and covers the whole yard when it searches for insects. I choose her to be the mother of the next generation over a hen who stands still and scratches down to the roots of the plant in the same spot day after day until she kills it.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, I'll even get up early. Day 4 is a very special day for my chicks.

Day two - the chicks move house

This is a two day old chick.

Today we had to perform a major reshuffle – the living arrangements just weren’t working out.

The playhouse in the garden had been converted to a nursery for two sister hens.  The 9 Christmas chicks and their mother hen, Alice, were sharing it with Angelina who is still waiting expectantly for her eggs to hatch in a few more days.

My plan was that the cousins would all live together, play together and the mothers would share the parenting -- kind of like what my sisters and I are doing with our children these school holidays.

This morning I discovered that Alice had shifted herself and all 9 chicks into Angelina’s nest. After settling in and even pushing some of her chicks under Angelina, that bossy mother started rolling her sister’s unhatched eggs out of the nest.

So now I’ve moved her into another little hen house inside the main chook house; at least until Angelina’s eggs hatch.

Relocating 9 chicks and a grumpy protective mother hen is harder than it sounds. It's twice as hard with three children under the age of five helping. It's much more risky than I usually engage in when Tiny (our tortoise shell puss - see below) is lurking in the shade beside the veggie patch.

Turns out it was my fault.

The chicks couldn’t get back into the barrel where they had been hatched.

I only realised this when I went out to check them at dusk and discovered Alice huddled up with them on the cold grass in the corner of her new lodgings. 

I’ve put in a little make-shift ramp at the hole so they can get in.  I’ve also topped up the nesting material so there’s less of a lip for them to negotiate to get out. So now they're happy but I'm covered in mosquito bites.

The upside is that if there are plenty of mozzies around where she's raising the chicks, that's actually a great thing. I'll try to photograph it tomorrow to share with you.

You can enjoy the simple pleasure of keeping chooks!

On Christmas Eve our mother hen had been sitting in a trance for 20 days, emitting a low rumbling from deep inside her whenever we approached to top up her water or coax her to eat.

Cradling a still-warm egg in the palm of your hand causes the world to slow, giving you a moment to stop and breathe. In that moment the background hum of traffic is absent, the anxiety of the morning rush no longer exists -- and the lovely girl who left the natural treasure coos at your feet, expecting a few kernels of maize.

This is my morning exchange. I am addicted.

By Christmas Day we had 9 lovely chicks.

Keepers of backyard chooks know of this simple pleasure.  But you do not even need a "backyard" to have chooks. A few square metres of courtyard is sufficient if you have the right girls. 

I know this because I have spent eight years developing the perfect chook for small yards.

I discovered the secret pleasure of keeping chooks quite by accident while I was completing a Master of Sustainability. What started out as a short project studying the calorie intake and egg output of different chicken breeds turned into an obsession. Now my family and I could never live without them in our garden.

Over the next few weeks I will tell you all about the flocks I have created, the attributes that make them so special and why they are suited to small yards.

By the time my Christmas Day hatch are laying (n about 18 weeks time)you'll wonder how your family ever got by without chooks.