The Great Chicken Swap

Over the past year, my wife and I tried our hand at raising backyard chickens for eggs.  We had a lot of fun, and learned a lot along the way, until our little chicken experiment came to an abrupt end shortly before the new year.  A predator (our research leads us to believe it was a raccoon or weasel) found a way inside the coop one night and killed the entire brood.  Since we don't plan to immediately acquire new chickens, I have decided to shut-down the website I started to chronicle our chicken adventures, and migrate some of the articles to this blog.  Below is such an article.  If you are interested in reading more about our experience raising backyard chickens, let me know in the comments below.  Thanks for reading.

So It Begins

My wife Courtney and I had been talking about raising backyard chickens for a while, so when our friends Jeff and Katie told us they were putting their house on the market, and needed to find a new home for their brood, we knew it was time to take the plunge.  Over the next several weeks we cleared out a space at the top of our yard and began building an environment for the chickens. Having zero experience with chickens, and being unsure exactly what we would need, I only built what I thought would be the bare essentials, a cinder block pad to protect their coop from burrowing predators, a chicken tractor/run to give them some space outside the coop, and a compost bin to dispose of their droppings.  Since Jeff and Katie were going to give us the coop that the chickens were currently living in along with the chickens, we decided we had everything we needed to get started, so we set a date and began to plan for The Great Chicken Swap.

We quickly realized that none of us had any experience with transporting 7 full-grown chickens, and this might be more difficult than it had seemed at first.  After scrapping our first few schemes, Jeff came up with the idea of loading the coop onto a trailer and transporting the chickens inside their own coop. Despite the potential for many things to go wrong with this plan, it was the best idea we had come up with so far, so we decided to give it a go.

The weekend of the move finally arrived, and I was filled with conflicting feelings of excitement about our new found feathered friends, and apprehension about what could go wrong with our somewhat questionable plan to transplant them.  Jeff called me mid-day and said that the chickens were out in the yard, and I could come by to help load the coop on the trailer whenever I was ready. Moving it was easier than we expected. At that point there was nothing to do but wait, and hope that the chickens returned to their relocated coop at sun-down.  Sure enough, like clockwork, as the sun set the hens retired to their perches inside the coop as it sat on the trailer. With a few ratchet straps securing the coop to the trailer, Jeff skillfully navigated the chickens from their house to ours. Surprisingly, the chickens tolerated the whole process very well, and didn’t seem flustered in the least when they arrived in our yard.  To keep their disruption to a minimum, Jeff simply unhitched the trailer, and left it in our yard overnight.

On Sunday morning I woke up with the sun, excited to welcome our flock to their new home.  They seemed equally excited to be let out of their coop, so I set up some temporary fencing to guide them from the coop to the chicken run I had built for them.  With that accomplished, Courtney and I proceeded to unload the coop from the trailer onto the cinder block pad. Once again, everything went much more smoothly than anticipated.  We proceeded to build a tunnel out of stiff fencing material between the coop and the run so the chickens could traverse between the two. Then it was time to make some coffee and take the opportunity to rest and watch the chickens adapt to their new surroundings.  They even had the courtesy to lay five eggs for us that first morning to provide a late, but much appreciated breakfast.

Over the next week we continued to improve their environment by fencing in an area next to the garden with chicken wire so they could have a place to run around and eat grass and bugs during the day when we are home to keep an eye out for predators.  I built a second tunnel between the grassy area and the run to make moving them in and out easy. I also built a watering system for them that I will outline in another post in case anyone would like to build something similar. They have been laying 5 to 6 eggs per day, which is not bad for seven chickens, some of them already three years old.

We have lots of plans for the future.  I would like to expand their environment as time and money permit.  I also have a few more necessities to build, like a dust bath so they will stop making their own in places I would rather them not dig out.  I have also purchased a solar panel and battery so we can bring these chickens into the 21st century with some modern electrical amenities. I plan to use a Raspberry Pi (small single board computer you can read about here) to automate a few things like filling up their water system, dispensing their nonperishable feed, and automatically opening and closing the coop door at dawn and dusk.  And since I will already have power and a computer, no coop would be complete without a live streaming chicken-cam. Eventually I would also like to expand our flock by bringing in a few more birds, but one thing at a time.  For now it’s enough to let the hens get used to their new home, as we get used to life raising backyard chickens.