Free-range chickens have worked about as well for me as the old 1969 Ford Galaxy sedan I used to own.
That is… not very well.
This is how I like to keep chickens:
IN CAGES! Like slaves! Like egg-making slaves!
Yet… I’m trying again.
What was I thinking?
I wrote an in-depth post on chickens and their housing earlier this year.
In it, I share my struggles over the years with keeping birds happy and keeping them safe from predators.
Everything wants to eat chicken. Even other chickens will eat chicken.
However, keeping birds happy and healthy requires letting them have some sunshine, grass, insects, and forage.
That’s why I was chasing chickens underneath the breadfruit the other night. Good for the birds’ happiness and healthiness, I guess; less so for my own.
It was fun seeing that huge bat, though. I would not have seen that if I wasn’t trying to get roosters out of trees. It was seriously a foot across.
At least.
Now I want a pet bat.
There are smaller bats living in an empty building right near my house and it was bigger than one of those.
But back to free-range chickens…
If I owned this property instead of just renting, I would spend the money to get some good fencing and create a multi-paddock chicken system. Justin Rhodes uses electric fence but I don’t think I can find that here.
The birds we have are a scrappy little variety. They do fend for themselves well in the jungle but if I let them go too far we won’t have any eggs.
For now, I will let them out during the day but will be corralling them back in at night before gets too late.
Sometimes I like chickens. Sometimes I don’t.
What I do like is eggs and bacon every morning. Nice, fresh homestead eggs.
And the best eggs, in my opinion, come from free range chickens. I would love to grow all their feed, as I once wrote in a big post at The Prepper Project, but I haven’t pulled that off yet.
Speaking of feed, I wonder if it would be worth raising my own bacon? I’ll bet free range pigs would be a lot of fun…
You can have greener thumbs by this weekend!
10 comments
I lost two chickens this week. Stuff happens, but I’ll continue to let them free range. They simply are not happy if they are in their coop or run for too long, and they let me know it too. So, I know I take risks by letting them out, but that’s the price to pay for freedom that I give them. Anybody with a 9-to-5 job knows what a slow death of boredom feels like. My chickens get the same way if I don’t let them out early enough each day.
One thing that has helped, though, is to put my two coops right next to my garden fences. I then made doors in my coops and garden fences so that the chickens can exit their chicken runs and enter the gardens and have additional protected space to roam around in. When they’ve finished weeding the gardens, I just let them roam free and take more risks.
It’s a lot of work to get fresh eggs when I know I could just buy them at the store for $5, but I’d miss out on all the drama, heartache, and triumph if I did. So we carry on!
That is pretty awesome. I want to place gardens next to ours as well.
We started out full free ranging our chickens until something (or somethings) found them and we started loosing two birds a day. So we compromised and created a large run with free ranging on a very random schedule to throw off the predators. So far so good! Since we started this we have only lost one bird (Kazooster the Rooster) when I forgot to lock them up after an evening of free ranging. :( Hard lesson learned!
Poor Kazooster. Such a great name and he died too soon.
Sounds like a good plan to me. I like a good run.
My birds are on lock down till the persimmons are picked. It starts early in July with the figs then guavas coming ready then spills over till early October. With sporatic lock-downs for the peaches. They RUN to the fruit trees even if I only let them out like half hour before dark… Sooo, I bring um the bads but not enough… They’ve already started egg eating to spite me…
They are little destroyers. One year they smashed and ate watermelons in my garden. I was mad.
My neighbor uses fish nets to catch the chickens.
I like it. Harpoons would probably be too much.
That is a crazy beautiful painting of a chicken and if you made that one David, you could make a series and put them on mugs or tote bags or coasters or anything. I’m smitten!
Thank you – this was not one of mine.
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