Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (24 page)

Provide enough waterers so at least one-third of your birds can drink at the same time. Even if you have so few chickens that one drinking station appears to be adequate, furnish at least two, spaced well apart, to ensure that all chickens can get a drink without fighting or being chased away.

In a large shelter provide one drinking station at least every 8 yards (7 m). Additional waterers outside the shelter encourage chickens to spend more time outdoors and are absolutely necessary during hot weather.

To make drinking easy and minimize contamination, position waterers so the top edge is the height of the birds’ backs. Make sure the surface is level so water won’t drip out.

Bell waterers
tend to get tipped over, the rim gets filled with debris, and the bottoms eventually rust through from constant ground-contact moisture. Hanging solves these problems for the metal 2-gallon (8 L) size. Since manufacturers don’t provide a handy way to hang them, you have to devise your own method. An easy way is to fashion a hanger out of a piece of 10-gauge solid/rigid wire with the ends wrapped around the drinker handle and the middle bent to hang from a hook or spring clip at the end of a chain coming down from the rafters.

For larger, heavier waterers and those used outdoors, place each drinking station over a miniature droppings pit. Build a wooden frame of ½-inch by 12-inch by 42-inch boards. Staple strong wire mesh to one side, and set the frame, wire side up, on a bed of sand or gravel. Place the waterer on the wire so chickens have to hop up onto the mesh to get a drink. Any spills will fall out of reach through the wire.

A 2-gallon (8 L) bell waterer may be hung from a chain so it can’t tip over or fill with debris.

No less than once a week, clean waterers with soap and water, and disinfect them with either vinegar or a solution of chlorine bleach — one part bleach to nine parts water. A grout brush, designed for cleaning kitchen and bathroom tiles, fits perfectly into the rim of a bell waterer for easy cleaning.

Deciding what to feed your chickens is easier when you know what a chicken would normally eat, given a choice. Knowing how a chicken digests what it eats is also helpful, since a chicken’s digestive system is a tad different from that of a human. Recognizing normal feeding behavior is not essential to developing a decent diet for your flock, but knowing what behavior to expect will enhance your chicken-watching experience.

A chicken free to choose what it eats is an opportunistic omnivore. Truly free-ranging chickens snack on a smorgasbord of grains and other seeds, tender greens, succulent fruits and vegetables, worms and slugs, crawling and flying insects, frogs and lizards, rodents, and small birds. They’ll scratch in the manure of other animals to glean insects, larva, and undigested grains. They’ll eat eggs and fresh meat, including other chickens and dead animals of other species. Given access, they’ll devour milk, yogurt, and other dairy products.

What chickens are not is vegetarian. They also are not primarily grazers, although they do like fresh greens in their diet the same way we humans enjoy a fresh salad with our meals. Chickens evolved in the jungle, an environment offering a broad variety of tasty things to eat. Barring a jungle environment, the next nearest thing is forest understory, which offers a tempting mini smorgasbord but is fraught with danger.

When we developed our present garden, we initially incorporated chickens as part of the setup. One day, while we were working in our as-yet-unfenced garden, we decided to let the chickens out of their yard. Instead of foraging close by, they headed straight for the surrounding woods to scratch for insects in the leaves. Before long we heard a single loud squawk and knew we’d lost a chicken. Moments later we heard a second squawk. When the flock returned from their outing in the woods, sure enough — we were short two hens, apparently carried off by a pair of foxes.

We eventually gave up the idea of combining chickens and garden but only because our garden is so close to our bedroom window that we got tired of the roosters’ early-morning wake-up call. Although a garden offers quite a variety of plant and animal life, indiscriminately turning chickens loose in a growing garden is a decidedly bad idea. They will chow down on or scratch up newly emerging seedlings, peck at red ripe tomatoes and strawberries, and demolish cucumbers and squash. But a well-managed system of combining chickens with a garden can benefit both the chickens and the garden, although in most cases it won’t come close to furnishing complete nutrition.

To stay ahead of predators, chickens evolved with the ability to eat a lot at one time, then move to a safe place where they can digest what they’ve eaten. Consequently, they forage actively at dusk, and digestion continues while they roost overnight — resulting in piles of droppings beneath the perch.

The expression “as scarce as hen’s teeth” — in reference to something extremely rare or nonexistent — came about because chickens have no teeth. Their digestion results entirely from a combination of chemical and mechanical actions.

Saliva starts breaking down feed as soon as it enters a bird’s mouth. The chicken’s tongue pushes the feed toward the back to slide down the throat (the
esophagus
) into an expandable
crop
, where it is temporarily stored. A full crop bulges in a manner similar to a chipmunk’s cheeks.