Setting free the chickens

On Sunday, I let our chickens out of their coop to run around freely for the first time. I was surprised by how quickly they took to it. They started scratching around in the grass and dirt, grazing on different tree and bush leaves, weeds, blossoms, and blades of grass. They stretched out in the sun, and gave themselves dust baths. How amazing that this behavior was encoded in them from the time they were single-celled eggs a couple of months ago. How do they know which things are good to eat? Jane and I set up a couple of chairs on the lawn and watched them for two hours in the afternoon sun. When the sky turned to dusk, the chickens lined up and walked back into the coop and up the inclined ramp into the cozy closed off section. Videos: Chickens experiencing their first taste of life outside the coop | Jane bugging our chickens

Previously:

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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druranium

I am enjoying bb poultry too! Definitely going to get some chickens when we move to our bigger place in the kountry.
@#13 mrong – ha!
LavenderNotes

Oh, I have to chime in! We have had our 3 hens for almost 2 years, and we love, love, love them! This was a bad molting year: many feathers, few eggs. But we love them anyway! They are the best form of entertainment (we don’t have TV, so maybe our standards are low — LOL). As for their instinct, it amazed me until last night, when — unbeknownst to me — one of our hens did not go inside at dusk and was left out all night to fend for herself. I was rudely awakened at 4 this morning by the angry squawkings of a hen fending off a cat. Headcounts are in order from now on!

@BADKITTYM: Hardly any noise, except for the proud Buh-KAAAAAWWWWW of a laying hen. As for neighbors, they’re easily bought off with eggs. :-)
Lucifer

I have also seen chickens catch a field mouse and kill it.
Anonymous

We have had chickens since this spring, and I agree, they are the most entertaining thing you can have in your yard. They do make a bit of a mess scratching dirt up onto the walkway, and pooping wherever they please, but it’s worth the trouble. I came home the other day to find my entire flock of ten chickens sitting on the front porch. They will come look in the windows and tap on the glass hoping for treats.

We live in a rural area, and so we are allowed to have roosters. Earlier this summer I saw our big rooster fight off a hawk to protect his hens!

I’m so glad BB has brought chickens the geek cred they deserve!
tliloia

Your Plymouth Barred Rocks look very similar to my Dominiques. We started raising chickens this June and the original goal was to have 2-3 layers. Somehow we ended up with a motley assortment of 22 hens that wander our yard freely; Dominiques, Bantam White Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orpingtons, Seabrights, etc.

Their food works out to about $30 a month, plus electricity for their heat lamp (we’re way up north) and a daylight bulb to keep them laying throughout the winter. We get 6-8 eggs a day now, and we’ll get 20+ eggs daily when they’re all laying. We can travel up to three days leaving them unattended with automatic feeders and waterers. Longer than that, a neighbor checks in on them.

As others have said, chickens are mightily amusing. Most of them have imprinted on me as “mommy,” so I have a poultry posse which follows me everywhere. And watching the pecking order in action during feeding times is fascinating. Foraging is trial and error. One of the girls attempted to eat the zipper off my winter coat this morning as I was tossing them sliced up jack o’lanterns. And yes, they do pick at the field mice that my cats kill. Ew. But that’s life on the farm.
robinmarshall

We had ours totally free ranging but they kept eating the vegetables – now they are restricted to about 900sqft for five chickens. Happy girls. The brown leghorn, goldypuff, can fly however, and doesn’t respect the 6ft fence nor the human/chicken housing separation, coming for inside for a visit every so often.
Digital Artz

I sure wish NYC would allow us to have chickens
in our cooped up apartments.
What fun ,the kid is cute and having more fun
then the Sheiks at Monte carlo.
successfulmindtraining

This was so heart warming! Thankyou for the post!
Stacyj

Count me in as another big fan of the chicken updates! I’m so jealous; I think the opportunity to have chickens is one of the -only- reasons I might like to live in an actual house with a yard someday … until I do, though, it’s great to get a little vicarious chicken joy through these posts =)
Takuan

what traits would we have to breed for for house-chickens?
jetfx

I used to play with chickens as a kid like in that picture. I also got the worst salmonella poisoning. Ten days on an IV.
sammich

Takuan @ 24 – if they’re anything like ducks – start with poo which is more solid. I rehabilitated a duck in the house once – take my word for it.
Takuan

right, dry poo pellets that smell faintly of lavender, check.
sammich

~or~ dry poo pellets that smell appetising to a dog – works with guinea-pig crap.
wolfiesma

So the rooster they thought was a hen got half eaten by the dog. They took it to the vet who stiched it up and prescribed antibiotics they had to administer three times a day. They wanted to keep it separate from the brood while it got better so they ended up bringing it inside the house where apparently it settled into a nice routine of couch sitting and tv watching. The part where it really jumped the rails, though, was when they ordered custom made… chicken diapers.
wolfiesma

Hey, that sounds like my weekend! For Thanksgiving, my brother in law brought over the rooster, which, up until a week ago, they thought was a hen. They won’t be able to keep it in the city, so the idea was let the poor thing nibble and peck freely, because his days are numbered. (They are looking for a suitable home in the country. But it was hard not to joke about it.)
caipirina

looks like great kid’s entertainment ..

I am really curious about having farm animals like that (hey, free eggs) … did you do a cost breakdown yet? how much does a chicken cost you?

Problem is, besides that currently we do not have the space … we are always traveling together .. so .. hmm .. would need a chicken sitter :)
igpajo

I’m having a bit of chicken synchronicity lately. Last night I was listening to a local talk radio show that was interviewing a woman who raises chickens in her backyard.
She’s got a blog about her chicken raising experiences called Meet-The-Chicks.

Slightly allergic to the feathers myself, but it sounds like it could be an interesting hobby.
Johnny Cat

Love the chickening going on at your place, Mark. But I’d really like to comment on that righteous shirt she’s wearing in the picture: yea, Stones!
sesquipedalian_id

We’ve had our home flock for about 7 months now, and have been letting them run free since about 2 months of age. At this point, they get cranky if we don’t let them out daily….
Lucifer

chickens are the best. I’ve always been a city slicker until my wife and I bought a house with a good sized yard. I built a small coop sized for 4-6 chickens and we got 4 1-week old chicks last year. they are great. They provide eggs, rich manure for compost, control pests to some degree, and aerate the dirt by scratching. They’re the perfect garden helpers (as long as you keep your young shoots protected from their appetites). They are very low maintenance and will return to their coops at dusk without having to wrangle them. Sometimes they perch on trees but it helps to clip their flight feathers on one wing to prevent that. They also love vegetable scraps.
I buy a $13 50-pound feed bag which lasts for about 2-2.5 months. They lay 1 egg a day per hen almost all year (they stop laying in winter unless you give them artificial light in the coop).
mrong

We too have a bunch of chickens that roam freely, they seem to enjoy it and always go back to the coup at night with no worries. It’s always amusing watching them wander around and chase the dogs.

Really keeping them doesn’t cost much, depending on how many you have, a single 10 – 14 dollar bag of feed will last me quite a while and I’ve got five chickens of assorted breeds. We get a few egg’s each day.

They also really, really like spaghetti, and grossly enough, scrambled eggs.
burningcanoe

Its good to see this – we keep a place in France (the middle of nowhere) and when we stay at it we keep three chickens, which get passed onto friends when we leave.
My daughter becomes so attached to them, names them, and hangs around with them. We also let them free range, and they are fun to watch. We pull snails from the garden and let the chooks feast.
MrsBug

Argh, you’ve got Chicken Movie! I’m so jealous. My husband and I can’t wait until next summer when we’ll (hopefully) have our own Chicken Movie. Did you bring popcorn? :)
Pipenta

â™¥ Chickens
mellowknees

I have a small flock of ducks and it really IS amazing that they’ve got it hard-coded in their little ducky systems that once it gets dark, they go back to their coop!

And they are REEAAAALLLY entertaining….better than most television shows (although I can’t say that I’ve thrown out the TV to only watch ducks – because they are NOT more entertaining than adult swim).

Raising poultry is a lot of fun! Plus, you get tasty eggs as a natural side product, and if you let your birds run free (even occasionally), you also get awesome natural pest patrol (especially with ducks – slugs and snails are like candy to them, I swear).
hedi

Actually, that’s normal in Indonesia. Indonesian people usually let the chickens out of their coop in the morning and mostly the chickens will head back by themself to the coon in the evening.

Surely, it won’t be able to do in the farm. :D
arkizzle

“I’d much rather be woken up by the cock than the clock.”

Once again Antinous, you provide the very acme of lyrical verisimilitude.
GeoCurious

We have enjoyed our Bantams for many years, we stopped keeping them because of the seemingly increased creativity of our neighborhood raccoons. The chickens provide many good photo opportunities (especially with the kids learning how to use the camcorder).
We found that “teenaged” chickens were very susceptible to early demise (neighborhood cats, passing red-tailed hawks, etc.).
One odd fact we found that hens we had gotten as eggs and raised inside could become very good at raising their own broods (but their chicks weren’t as friendly because of less handling). It’s weird to think that none of this is learned behavior.
BadKittyM

Nothing like a few hens to keep the yard around your home free of any insects. Alas, they will replace said insects with chicken poop, but hey – it’s fantastic fertilizer. I don’t recommend trying to keep them within a suburban setting, though. It’s annoying as can be for your neighbors unless you have a very, very large property. I greatly enjoyed mine when I spent a year or so living on a small farm in Washington. They get awfully tame, and will come running to the door just like dogs when they hear you come out.
joshhaglund

“How do they know which things are good to eat?”

Their food finding algorithm has a number of flaws. My chicken often mistakes the laces of my shoes for food. And for chickens, gravel is an important staple.
sammich

Lyrical he surely is…
joshhaglund

#10 BADKITTYM: hens don’t make more noise than a dog. roosters crow at inopportune times but hens just make a bit of fussy clucking during the day every so often.
- Antinous
  
  roosters crow at inopportune times
  
  I’d much rather be woken up by the cock than the clock.
mrong

My rooster often perches itself on top of my pony and rides around the yard ( my pony wanders freely as well, I have a lot of land).
buddy66

I’m being serious now â€” surprising myself â€” but I’ve got to tell you how much I’m enjoying the Chicken Diaries. They’re postings I really look forward to. We had some chickens when I was a kid, and this brings back how much I enjoyed them… well, I mean, thanks.