Now we often get big bags of scraps deposited on our front porch, with peelings from carrots, zucchini, potatoes, fruit, etc. and often egg shells.  The problem is that the chickens have a hard time pecking at the large uncooked peelings.  

So I have taken it on myself to dump it all in our food processor to chop it up into peck-sized pieces.  I call my creation, "Chicken slaw."  Doesn't it look appetizing? The chickens like it quite a bit.

We also are appreciative of other donations we receive toward the chicken-feeding effort.  We get carrot tops and lettuce that is past its prime from various neighbors.  We sometimes get jars filled with snails (good protein!).  We recently received our first batch of spent barley from a beer brewer, and the chickens loved it.

KGO 7 news has finally aired their news story on the urban chickens trend... which features us!  (They were supposed to give us a heads-up before it aired, but fortunately it's available online.)

We volunteered when we heard on the Oakland Pet Chickens Meet-Up Group that they were looking for people to interview.  They came out last month to interview us and got some good shots of Madeleine.

Then a couple weeks ago they came back again so that KGO anchor Dan Ashley could do his little blurb about BackyardChickens.com and Backyard Poultry magazine in front of our house.  They came back for the talent, of course—to try to get the chickens in the shot as Dan talked. 

But that also meant a big opportunity for me as an official chicken wrangler.  The chickens were not so impressed by Dan and the camera, and were more intent on scratching around for worms.  So they asked me if I could keep coaxing the chickens back toward Dan while I stayed off camera.  It was more like throwing them back in the shot.  It took somewhere around 20 takes for Dan to get through the copy.

Our live chicken cam is now back online and perched on the edge of our coop peering in through the chicken wire.  We may be tweaking it over the next few days to try to get the best angle.  The chickens have free range of the corner of our yard during the day, but they come back into the coop to lay, eat, and drink.  The nest boxes (where they lay) are directly ahead, with the water dispenser above it.  Their food dispenser is to the left.

We also have our egg ticker back in the right column of every page.  Take a look... it's okay, I'll wait.  That's showing the total counts laid by our current flock to date.  You can also see the full calendar with eggs laid each day for our current flock (calendar for our first flock is here).  You can see how long it took before each flock started laying and on the older calendar the variation in laying rates by season. 

Ann's been particularly excited with this flock to watch the laying progress ("Quiche is back in the nest box again."), so I presume she'll be keeping the new calendar up-to-date.

The coop we built from some diagrams in an old organic gardening magazine served it's purpose well, but had some drawbacks.  It was very heavy and difficult to move, quite hard to clean, and hard to completely secure.  The final straw was when we found a mouse or rat was trying to take up residence in the next boxes.

For the new coop, we settled on a Chick-N-Hutch with an attachable Chick-N-Rabbit Pen.  It was easy to put together, is relatively light, and was cheaper than the materials we spent on the original coop. It has a pan under the wire mesh floor that collects the poop and can easily be slid out. 

The coop also has a pole across it, so that the girls can perch at night.  While there's room for all four to do this, they're still fighting over who gets to sleep on the perch (two or three of them win, and the other one or two sleep under them on the wire mesh).

The only major downside so far was that it had an unsecured swinging panel on the back wall that we thought a raccoon could exploit.  I replaced it with a thicker hinged door with a latch.

Soon after we set up the coop, Madeleine learned that if she got scared of the chickens (pecking or chasing her, which they occassionally do) she could run inside the coop and close the door behind her.

We've had to put down Soufflé, one of our two Rhode Island Red chickens, after a couple weeks of illness.

We don't know what caused her condition, but just noticed her limping around one day. She had one of her feet curled up and was trying (very unsuccessfully) to walk on her knuckles. I initially thought she injured one of her front toes, but I'm not sure that was really the case. We also noticed that the tip of the claw/nail on the back toe (thumb?) was broken off.

I taped her three toes to a piece of cardboard, as recommended on some online posts.  She was then able to stand/balance on it), but she still kept falling over when trying to walk (mostly with the foot sliding one way or the other). The cardboard has also come off twice.  A quick call with a vet relative with chicken knowledge said it was premature to put her down and we should at least give her a week, and we heard from someone else that chicken leg/foot injuries are not uncommon and tend to heal.

We separated her from the rest of the flock, keeping her in another part of our yard for the day and returning her to the coop at night. We hadn't seen the others in the flock going after her yet, but were worried that could become a problem. A couple days later, we borrowed a cage to bring her inside to reduce her stress.  We did a fair amount of research, mostly on backyardchickens.com, and tried some recommended treatments (B vitamin supplement and calcium).  

While we were away on vacation, our neighbor nursed it to some extremes-- letting the chicken sleep on her and making a sling/hammock out of old pantyhose to hold her up in the cage (our neighbor has her own pet birds and gave our chickens massages the last time she chicken-sat).