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 andBackyard 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.

We are pleased to announce that after a long hiatus, some of our most popular site features have returned.

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 ishere).  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 time came to retire the coop we built for our first flock and get some new digs for our current flock.

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).

But Soufflé's health continued to deteriorate.  She could no longer stand up at all, splayed her legs out to the sides when she was on the ground, and kept purposefully flipping herself out of the sling.  I ended up chopping off her head with our neighbor's ax to end her life quickly and then burying her in our yard. A new and not very fun experience for us, but I guess a rite of passage for chicken farmers.  It was sad to do that after spending so much time trying to help her get better, but we think it was best to relieve her pain, and our pain in watching her flounder.

Before updating you on the goings on of our flock, here is some other relevent chicken news:

• Alameda Magazine has an article in its latest issue on backyard chickens in our city. The print edition even has a photo of Joy, one of the Rhode Island Reds we previously owned and passed on to another family last year.
• Of our many friends who have told us that they also want to raise chickens someday, the first has followed through.
• If you haven't noticed, the price of eggs is soaring.  That's because the price of chicken feed is soaring.  And that's because corn prices are soaring.  And that's because so much of it is being used to make ethanol and save the planet (except that we burn seven barrels of fossil fuels to produce eight barrels of corn ethanol, not to mention all the other reasons it's a bad idea).  Sigh.

Closer to home, our new chickens have finally moved from their digs in the tub in Madeleine's bathroom to a coop of their very own outside.  They're fenced off so they can free-range in a good-sized corner of our yard and so we can try to grow some grass on the other side for Maddy to run around on.  Eggs will probably start arriving in June.

Before we moved them outside permanently, we were putting them outside (in our backyard) during the day and bringing them in around dusk.  After doing so for about six weeks, we had a scare the first time we forgot to bring them in before dark.  I was the one who forgot, as Ann and Madeleine were spending a rare overnight away from home (precluding the need to bring the chickens in before Maddy's bedtime). 

Once I realized it was dark and I hadn't brought them in, I rushed out the back door and heard something big scamper up the redwood tree (probably a raccoon).  I found two very scared chickens huddled up against our front fence and no sign of the others.  After bringing them in, I spent another half hour unsuccessfully looking for the others before calling Ann to tell her the bad news.  I decided to look some more and after an hour found two more, each hiding up against the fence in far corners of the yard (one behind our compost bin).  I kept looking for our last chicken—"Quiche, our Ameraucana—"even checking our front and side yards to no avail.  I looked again at 6am the next morning and finally found her nonchalantly walking along the other side of the street (yes, for the first time in our experience as hen farmers, we did have a chicken cross the road).

The chickens were all freaked, but apparently uninjured except one.  We noticed that Scramble, one of the Rhode Island Reds, appeared to be blind (with both eyes closed all the time).  One seems to have recovered completely after a few days, while the other remains closed and sunken in.  We're watching her closely. We thank Ann's veterinarian aunt and uncle for tips on treating traumatized chickens.

Hopefully the future will be less eventful for this flock.

It's hard to get them to pose, but formally introducing them with the photo on the left (clockwise from the top), are new chickens are: Quiche, Sunny (as in sunny-side up), Soufflé, Frittata, and Scramble.

It seems like it was just a few months ago when we sadly found new homes for our chickens.  That's probably because it was a few months ago.

I don't entirely understand why Ann suddenly decided in the past week that we should start a new flock right now (after deciding to send the previous ones to greener pastures), but it apparently has to do with:

• her recent reading of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (highly recommended),
• dissatisfaction with store-bought eggs after being spoiled with 1,900 fresh ones over the last three years,
  
• concern that we should take advantage of our coop "before it rots,"
• sadness that Maddy still asks about the where-abouts of the chickens, and
  
• speculation that our daughter would really, really appreciate seeing chicks grow up.

So this morning we piled into the car and drove to the Alamo Hay & Grain Company to peruse some ducks, rabbits, and homing pigeons, and to pick out our new chicks.

On my encouragement, we got five this time around (really no more work than four).  We also went with a little more variety, choosing four different breeds:

• Rhode Island Reds: We got two of these solid layers of brown eggs (we had three last time).
• Ameraucana: We again got one of these beautiful hens that lays blue-green eggs, although not as regularly as other varieties.
• Plymouth Barred Rock: We're trying one of these brown egg layers that supposedly continues laying through the winter.
• Golden Sexlink: We don't know much about this variety, but it's the one other they had.  We're not even entirely sure what it will look like when it matures.  However, you may want to refrain from plugging this breed name into a Google image search.

So we now have these two-day-old chicks keeping warm under a heat lamp in our house until they mature a bit and can be moved outside.  Madeleine has been excited to watch, pet, and hold them.  The chicks have already begun their webcam career, so you can see them live right here.

We are sad to announce that we are no longer chicken farmers here in Alameda. After a fun three year experiment of raising hens in our backyard, we've decided we'd like to reclaim the space so that Madeleine can play outside without sinking to her knees in chicken manure. So we sent out an e-mail to other people we know in Alameda who raise chickens, which made its way to the Alameda Backyard Chickens Yahoo! group. 

Within a week we had takers for our faithful egg layers, Annie, Omelette, Wiggly, and Joy. Joy went to a household just six blocks from us, and the other three moved a few miles from here where they joined a flock of 13 hens.

As our egg ticker reports, the girls faithfully produced 1,914 eggs while they were under our care.  We aren't happy that we have to buy eggs again (we were shocked at the price of organic eggs when we bought our first dozen from the store recently), but we are glad to not have to wipe chicken poop off our shoes, clean out the coop, and keep up with food and water. We do plan to raise chickens again after we re-landscape our backyard and figure out a better system for confining them to a part of the yard. Our hope is to get more day-old chicks in another year or so and let Madeleine watch them grow.

This past month I noticed that our hen Omelette was hanging out beneath our back deck in a far corner and wouldn't come out except to eat. It is so dark under the deck I couldn't see her well, but I thought I spotted an egg just behind where she was crouching. After three days of Omelette just sitting there, I declared to Paul that she must be brooding and trying to hatch that egg. So, like a good husband and chicken farmer, he put on some old clothes and crawled through the chicken manure under the deck to assess the situation. After much cajoling, he got Omelette to move from her protective crouch where she was sitting with her wings spread wide. When she finally did move, Paul spotted a large clutch of eggs that she was keeping warm.  In fact, there were 21 eggs she was trying to hatch! Of course, chickens have brains the size of peas, and most of their behavior is governed by instinct, so she didn't know that because we don't have a resident rooster that none of those eggs would ever turn into baby chicks. Instead, they turned into hardboiled eggs that we hid for our annual Easter egg hunt the next day.

One day the week before Christmas in the late afternoon, we heard our chickens freak out (squawk and scatter/run/fly).  When we looked out out back window over the deck we saw a big hawk fly to a perch in one of our trees, right about at our eye level.  Unfortunately, by the time I grabbed my camera, it was gone.

Then I went out and counted all four of our chickens, with no apparent damage.  Three of them had run under our deck for cover, and the fourth was next to our front gate (I guess it decided to run the other direction). More than a year ago our neighbor thought he saw a hawk take off from our neighboring fence after checking out the chickens, but we hadn't had any problems since then.

If cats have nine lives, I wonder how many chickens get. 

We're finally posting some photos from Madeleine's first Halloween.  She was able to show off her costume at my company's Halloween party, and she got some rousing applause as the first of the kids to display her costume.  We took these extra photos the next day.