It can’t be overstated: one of the best parts of living in a rural area is that I am free to keep a flock of laying hens. They serve as a food source as well as a source of constant amusement and their presence is therapeutic and practical. Managing a small flock of happy-go-lucky birds requires very little effort and is 100% worth your while.
My first flock of hens were Rhode Island Reds, a prolific laying breed, that my dad got for our family when I was a child. I raised them as a 4-H project: feeding and watering them every day, cleaning out their coop, collecting eggs, and finally bringing them to the county fair to be judged. These birds were extremely tame, as they were all handled daily by my younger curiouser self. They would ride around on my shoulder and climb up on my lap when I sat in their coop with them. As I grew older, taking care of them just became a chore (especially in the winter months), and as they grew older—their laying days done—my hens ended up in the freezer, much to my horror.
That was a long time ago, but I’d always carried that memory in my mind, and, in adulthood, that memory became an ambition or goal for the future: someday I would have a flock of hens again. In the winter of 2008, my wife and I bought a small acreage with several barns. The first project we undertook was to build a chicken coop inside one of those barns and in the spring we brought home a couple of boxes of peeping fuzzballs from the post office. We haven’t looked back since.
The hens I have now are a far cry from the rusty brown monoculture of my youth. We have a huge variety of birds: large and small, fancy and plain. Consequently we get a huge variety of eggs of all shapes, sizes, and colors. During the summer months, we get way more eggs than we need, and end up distributing them to our friends for a small fee. The novelty of having such eggs is usually pretty exciting for a certain clientèle, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. The pale, bland, boring eggs available in stores these days are a sad substitute for what we enjoy on a regular basis—not to mention the ethical quandary one faces upon researching the lives those hens live, often locked in tiny cages. Our hens are free range foragers, and although we do have a fenced-in chicken run to keep the cats and weasels out, said fence does not keep chickens in. They can fly right over it, and do, regularly. Some of our Sumatrans will roost up in a nearby box elder tree in the summer. I like having happy free birds who lay happy free eggs.
Chickens evolved nearer to the equator than my current geographical location. The equatorial region is a much warmer place with more constant daylight than my little piece of prairie wasteland. However, chickens have been kept and adaptively bred in the northern hemisphere for all of the history of western civilization. That means that with an insulated shelter they do pretty well in the winter months. With enough birds, their coop stays above 40 degrees on body heat alone. An electric warmer is needed to keep their water from freezing and during the super cold days a heat lamp or small electric heater can be used with ease.
One thing that does drop off in the winter months is egg production. Chickens are adapted to produce more eggs with more daylight. It’s a hormonal thing that ensures that maximum egg production will happen in the spring and summer when it is easiest to raise a brood of chicks: warmer temps, more abundant food, and enough time to get those chicks into adulthood for the fast approaching winter.
Depending on your latitude, this can mean that a large percentage of your flock will cease to produce eggs for months on end. This can be a good thing for health of the birds: it gives them some time to build up body weight during the metabolically trying time of lower outside temperatures. It will also often correspond with a moult, in which the birds will pathetically shed their feathers, bit by bit, and grow in some new plumage. It’s good to give them some time off; we always give them a month to rest in the fall. This also gives us some time to eat up the egg reserves that are often lingering in our refrigerator!
If you are depending on eggs as a food source and need them to produce throughout the winter there is a simple solution to the light issue. You just need to simulate longer days (14-16 hours) by placing a lamp near the ceiling of the chicken coop, making sure to point it over the food and water sources and the nesting boxes. You will also need to plug it into a programmable timer. My coop has skylights that allow a lot of light in during the day, so I have the timer turn the lights on at 5:30am and turn them off at around 8am when the sun is doing its job. In the evening I have the timer come on at 4:30pm and turn off at 8:30pm. This gives those crazy birds around 15 hours of light and gives us plenty of eggs, for our needs. The added power needed to run the lamps, in my case, is hardly anything. But if you don’t have skylights or a good south-facing window, it could be an issue to consider. You might just be better off giving the girls an extended vacation, they will more than make-up for it in the spring, and it you will appreciate their efforts all the more.
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