Chickens Every Day
Dedicated to helping backyard chicken owners keep the happiest and healthiest flocks we can.
Chickens Every Day
Backyard Chicken Drama: Stress, Broody Hens, and Egg Production
Are we ready, pawpaw? Hello friends and welcome to Chicken. Every Day, a podcast for you, the backyard chicken enthusiast, and mine. Your host is my Pawpaw, gary, Gary Valerie of Senla Backyard Chickens. Here we have fun while sharing ideas and learning how to care for our foul-feathered friends. Check out our videos at Senla that's C-E-N-L-A Backyard Chickens on YouTube, tiktok and Facebook. So, without further ado, let's start today's show. How was that?
Speaker 2:Hello everyone. Gary, with CENLA Backyard Chickens here with you again, welcome to the podcast, welcome to the show. Today we're going to do something a little bit different. I am just going to talk off the cuff, nothing prepared, about what's been going on with my flock over the last two to three months, and I think this may be something that I'm going to do on a semi-regular basis. I mean, chances are, most of you guys have the same type of flock that I do, just a mixture of backyard chickens that we have back there. So some of the same issues are going to crop up that I've had. So let's kind of get into what's been going on with my birds. So almost three months ago, like we usually do in the spring, I bought a bunch of young chicks Okay, two day old chicks from the local feed store. Let's see, I've got a naked neck. I got two black copper marans, I got two uh olive eggers and I got four polish okay, because my daughter my oldest daughter, doesn't even live with me has been trying to get some polish chickens from me that are females and they always end up either something happens to them and they pass or they end up being guys. So I've got eight chicks total a few months ago, okay, and these chicks have been growing.
Speaker 2:If you have listened and looked at some of my videos in the past, you know the way I do my chicks. The first two and a half to three weeks they spend in the brooder. The brooder is four feet long, two feet wide, two feet high just a small brooder to keep these young chicks. Once they hit three weeks of age they go outside to the grow-out pen. The grow-out pen is a three foot wide, eight foot long house up on wheels, completely wrapped in hardware cloth. It is a grow-out pen. It is also a chicken tractor. You can use it for that. I also use it for what's called chicken gel. We'll get into that here in just a little bit.
Speaker 2:It use a natural branch about that big around or so that I put inside there for it to roost on. It's got heat in it. It's got fans. I have two very quiet small little black fans that I have in this thing. If it gets very, very hot, I turn the fans on for them. It is very, very nice. It enables me to run them around the yard, keep fresh grass under them.
Speaker 2:But the really big thing that this does. It allows the big chickens to interact with these young chicks, slash young pullets without being able to touch them. They start getting used to one another so many times. After about a week or so, I will go out there and the big chicks are all sitting around, just sitting around the grow out pen. You know hanging out there and the big chicks are all sitting around just sitting around the grow out pen. You know hanging out with where the young little ones are. So by the time they're let out, they're almost already part of the flock already and I usually I will leave them in there probably till they're close to four months old. I just took them out the other day and I'll talk about that with you. But this fact that they get so used to them that by the time you really let them start getting out and interacting, they're basically part of the flock already.
Speaker 2:The way that I do that when they're four months old or so and this was I did this about, oh, I guess about three weeks ago I go out one day when I'm going to be able to spend some time with them and I open the door to the grow out pen and I raise the big lid on the front to the grow-out pen. So now the big birds can get in it, the little birds can get out, they can all start mingling together. What happens whenever I do this? Because they're all so used to one another. There's no big pecking, there's no trying to hurt anybody. There's always that posturing. The big girls want to show you okay, I'm higher than you in the pecking order, you really need to remember this. And they chest bump and they'll do this right here with one another, just to show who's boss. Nobody gets hurt and I'll let them do that for a good two weeks.
Speaker 2:And what happens in the evenings? The big girls go to their coop, the little young pullets, they go to the grow-out pen. That's where they go to bed. Then one day I decide to make the change. Okay, I take away the grow-out pen. Well, let me back up.
Speaker 2:About a week before I remove the grow-out pen, I move all the water and all of their feed to the chicken run and I have two chicken runs. One is uncovered, one is covered. They're both separated, but they do have a chicken run door between the two of them, which I absolutely love to be able to work with that, and I put the feed, their feed, their 19% or whatever the young chick feed is and their water, all in the enclosed run. Inside that enclosed run is also the chicken pen, where the hens go to sleep at night, where they go to lay their eggs. So the young birds get used to going in there, coming out, going in, because I let my birds free range every day they interact with the big chickens as well. So everybody's going in and out and I'll let them do this about a week or so, to where I know that they're kind of okay with one another doing it. Then one day and this one day was three days ago I'll remove the grow out pin completely.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is confusing the first two or three nights, because the little ones, you know, really have been used to sleeping in there. Where do they go to sleep? Inevitably and this has happened this time too one or two of them. You say, okay, I'm going in here with the big ones and I'm going to bed. See you, good night. The rest of them, I'll catch them outside, or a lot of times they'll be up trying to get on top of the fence somewhere. They'll just try to do something to get up by, and I and I go out at night and I put them back in in the uh to grow out in the run. I'm sorry where they're supposed to go. I did this for three nights. The fourth night they were all in there. The fifth night they were all in there. The fifth night they were all in there. So they learn really pretty fast on doing this. But I said all this to kind of make a point. Okay, when you bring young chickens in, you take the big chickens out of their normal operating procedure.
Speaker 2:Chickens will make any excuse in the world to feel like they've been stressed out and stress is one of the reasons that they don't lay eggs. My girls, I've got 13 hens that are eligible for layers. They're grown, they're young, they're great, they should be good layers and two months ago I was getting 10 to 12 eggs a day at least 8 to 10 or 11, 12 a day. I mean I was getting a really nice bit of eggs and I sell my eggs. I have an eggs down out front, so I really enjoy doing that.
Speaker 2:Then all of a sudden the weather turns bad. We had a solid month of overcast skies, raining every day. It is sopping wet outside. The chickens cannot get out and really do chicken. They go in and out as they can between rainstorms, but I mean it is just nasty and gloomy weather and the hens just quit laying. I went from that many eggs let's call it ten eggs a day, sometimes even better, to three and four eggs if I'm lucky a day. The only difference that was going on, because the weather was not all that extremely hot like it is right now, but the the only difference that was going on because the weather was not all that extremely hot like it is right now, but the only real big thing that was going on at that time these young birds came into the story and the stress of the weather. So that was two stressors that were on them. That was going on right there. The third stressor I had three hens that decided okay, we're going to be broody.
Speaker 2:And if you guys are new to this game and you don't know what broody is, when a hen becomes broody that means she wants to be a mama. She has physiological and hormonal changes that happen in her body. Her body temp raises up, she wants to hatch eggs and she's going to get on the nest. She's going to stay on that nest thinking that she's going to be hatching some eggs and they'll do that. If they don't have fertile eggs under there, they'll still stay on that nest a month, sometimes even more.
Speaker 2:You move them off. We try to get them out of the way, but the problem that happened with mine I wasn't able to put them in the grow out pen whenever all all this first started, because that's generally where I would put them to move them away from the main flock, put them in that grow-out pen with no nesting box in there and try to help break them from being broody. I couldn't do that because I had the young pullets in the grow-out pen, so these three hens had to stay on the nest and I'm constantly going out there shooing them off of the nest. Well, the other girls couldn't lay eggs. Okay, there was only one nest available. Several times I caught a chicken standing next to one of the broody ones in the in the roost, trying to get some room in there to lay eggs, and they couldn't get in there to do it. Well, it just so happened that I knew, with these young pullets coming up, that I was going to need more nesting boxes. So I had another couple built and so I put them out there inside the run, but the big ones really never got used to doing that. So therefore we had the third stressor come in. They can't get to their nesting box all of a sudden because of these frigging broody hens that I have. So I had these three stressors.
Speaker 2:Egg production went to crap. I mean it just went down. Uh, you know two, three, four eggs a day, four if I'm lucky. Whenever I've got 13 good, healthy hens. So between the young biddies, the terrible weather and then those that are on the nest blocking access to it, my girls start shutting down. So if you've ever had these kind of problems, try to think about the issues that are associated with them, and it's usually something simple like that.
Speaker 2:There's tons of things that'll make a chicken stop laying eggs Molting season. They're all going to stop during molting season whenever they drop their feathers and they grow new. Generally this is in the fall, so they can get a good niceage to get ready for for the uh, winter that's coming up shorter, shorter hours of daylight that's going to drop them. Chickens need a good 14, 15 hours of daylight that stimulates something in their brains to get them to where they want to lay eggs and where they where they will eggs. Those two things weren't happening over here, but the other stressors were and my girls were just not doing what they needed to do. So finally, about a week ago, I said, okay, it's time I took the young ones away from the grow-out pen. I moved the grow-out pen further out in the yard. The young ones are now starting to go to bed at nighttime with the big girls in there. I took the three hens that were robbing the nest space.
Speaker 2:I put them in chicken jail Okay, and it's plenty enough room in that grow out pen for them to hang out in chicken jail. I left them in there a week. I took two of them out yesterday and they seem to be doing fine. They seem like they broke their broody on there. They haven't been back on the nest. I'm washing them real close.
Speaker 2:I took them out early I get it because I usually lay them in there a week because one of my hens, a white Plymouth Rock, who we will now name Karen she is a true Karen. In other words, she's a pain in the ass and she was trying to pick on the other ones and if you're from the US, you probably know what Karen means whenever we talk about that. In these cases, a Karen is not a who, it's a what. So kind of look that up to see what we're talking about. So I took these out. One was a black sex link. The other one that I took out, she's a sweet girl. What is she? She is a cuckoo marron and her coloring is. They call it cuckoo. She's a cuckoo marron. She lays dark eggs, not extremely dark, but they're darker than any of the rest of them, of what they do. And she's just a sweetheart and she was getting picked on. The black sex links were getting picked on by the Karen that I mentioned earlier, so I took them out earlier than what I wanted to, but it looks like maybe, maybe, maybe, that they're doing okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, this has been going on for a few days now. Now the big girls that the main flock, they have all four nesting boxes wide open to them. So yesterday I got six eggs. Day before yesterday I got five eggs. Not sure what I'm going to get today. I went peaked a little bit earlier and there was a hen on the nest. I don't know what was under her, but the other three nests were empty. And then the other two nests that I brought in a few weeks ago they were empty as well. Usually with the two nests I have a couple of them not olive-eggers but Easter Eggers that lay a light green egg. They kind of like to hang out in those, and those are a little bit younger hens than some of the older girls, so they took to it a lot quicker.
Speaker 2:But that's what's been going on with my flock here lately, just the stresses of those young ones that I had, the nasty-ass weather that we've had, and weather can play a role, because weather stresses out your birds. Anything for a hen is a stressor. Chickens are creatures of habit. They're a flock creature. They have a flock mentality. They want to live inside. Anything that's different from what they do day to day just freaks them out. Mine apparently got freaked out. I went from great egg laying to really poor egg laying and I had customers out there going hey, what you doing? What's going going on. So I just advertised on Facebook. You know, hey, you're just gonna have to wait. The girls are taking a little bit of a break right now. It seems that maybe they're starting to perk up a little bit more. I certainly hope so.
Speaker 2:Their feed is good. Right now I'm feeding the most expensive Purina that I can get and no, I do not subscribe to the government making Purina. Put something in the chicken feed to stop the hens from laying. That was something that was going on a few years back during COVID and stuff like that. If you haven't heard of it, I'm not going to dig into it right now, but it's almost hilarious. You can look this stuff up online.
Speaker 2:But but suffice it. Say I feed them a really good quality feed this time of of year, when it's really hot, I bump up the protein level. So I've gone from a 16% protein layer feed to a 18% protein layer feed. Give them a little bit more boost. They need that in the summer. The same thing in the winter. I go from 16% to 18% in the winter because it takes more energy to drive their bodies in the winter than it does the summer.
Speaker 2:But protein is important for your hands just as much as calcium is. Protein drives the mechanism that creates the egg. Protein is what keeps their feathers healthy. Protein is what keeps their liver function going the way that it should their enzymes in their digestive system. Protein is very, very important. The egg album, the white part of the egg, is mostly protein. Okay, protein is a big big deal and in the summertime, when the birds are stressed, they're not eating as much because of the fact that they're laying around in the heat. They need more protein. In the wintertime, it takes more energy to keep their bodies warm, so therefore they need more protein. In the wintertime, it takes more energy to keep their bodies warm, so therefore they need more protein, and so I bump their feet up to do that. So I know it's not a feed issue.
Speaker 2:They get snacks quite regularly and I use black soldier fly larvae. That's the snacks that I use when it's real hot. I'll do little treats for them that's half for me as much as they are for him them. But I will slice up some uh, blackberries. I will slice up some grapes, put them in a little ice tray, fill ice with them and bring them out to the girls. They love. Pecking those things apart helps cool their bodies down. At the same time, when we hit, when we eat watermelon around here and that's a big summer treat in louisiana I will give them watermelon love that.
Speaker 2:I have two different compost piles outside that we're always bringing some vegetables and plant matter and stuff in. I love for my chickens to jump in there and scratch around and poop and do their thing, so they get to do that Again. Like I said, plus, they free-range every day so they're out there eating bugs and whatever else that they can get a hold of. I know my girls are on a good, strong, healthy diet. I don't have any issues with that. I don't really have much in the way of illness going around. I keep a good, healthy dust bath for them and I've got a video on that if you want to check through the archives and look at some of the videos. So they always have a good dust bath. I've never had a mite problem with them. So what else is left for them to quit doing this laying Then? That's what it's going to be the stressors that they had between the young ones and the weather coming in, not being able to report. We're back to full production. We're not there yet, but I think that we're starting to inch up a little bit, so hopefully that's going to be the truth about the matter.
Speaker 2:Anyway, thought you'd like to know what's going on with my flock right now 13 hens that are good to go. Oh, by the way, out of the four Polish four Polish every single one of them boy, every single one. Three of them that I knew that were guys because they started doing the crowing thing. You know, when they sound like they've got a pickle in their mouth he runs chickens on. Sometimes he processes them. Most of the time he lets them run around and do their thing, because he always likes raising chickens and he just lets his chickens raise on their own. So it's good that I have a way to do that, and if you're out getting young chicks.
Speaker 2:You need to be able to have a way to deal with your roosters that you're going to have. Don't drop them off. Roosters cannot live out in the wild. They're no longer that wild bird that they were thousands of years ago. They are a prey animal and they will quickly become a prey animal and if they don't, they will probably starve to death, you know. So it's not a good thing to drop them off. Just make sure you get a plan.
Speaker 2:The fourth one that I thought was going to be a girl. You know, in a Polish, the guys, the males on the Polish, the young roosters, their hairdo looks kind of like Rod Stewart, where the girls are more tightly bound. You know, in their hairdo it's just a big cotton ball, like in there. Well, I had one white lace black Polish I was kind of curious about. Well, her hair isn't just like I think it should be, but it's not as wild looking as these other three and it's not crowing. It's not trying to crow. So whenever I got rid of three, I kept that one. Two days later afterwards it starts trying to make a crowing sound. So I was going to get rid of it.
Speaker 2:Talking with Sylvie If you guys don't know who Sylvie is. She's a granddaughter. She does the introductions and the exits on my podcast, that Chicken's Everyday podcast, and she wants to keep it to see how well it does. And the reason I haven't kept roosters in the last several years is because of the attitude. Roosters can be real assholes Every now and then you can get a nice one, but it's really tough to make sure that you do. It takes a lot, a lot of work to raise a rooster to be like that. Hopefully we're going to be able to be successful with this one, but I'll let her know If it doesn't work. That rooster's got to go to the farmer because we can't keep something, especially around my young grandchildren, that I can't trust. So I'm sure you guys would agree with that. So anyway, that's what's going on with the flock over here at Send Lob Backyard Chickens right now. Hopefully I'm going to start getting a lot more eggs.
Speaker 2:The heat is ramping up. I think today's high is supposed to be 94, 95 degrees and it's not going to get any cooler for the next month month and a half for sure and I know they're going to start wanting to take breaks come then. But I want to make sure I'm doing everything that I can do to help maximize their production, give them everything that they want spoiling my chickens great dust bath, plenty of nest boxes that they have good, healthy food, plenty of fresh, clean water every day, shade trees to hang out under and, if I didn't mention it earlier, inside my chicken pen I have a small fan and I have a large fan. Okay, the small fan pushes out a little bit of air. The large fan pushes out a lot of air. These are all on Alexa. Yeah, I get it, I'm that guy.
Speaker 2:So if it's really really hot at night, I'm going to run fans inside the coop to help keep the birds cool, especially by morning it's almost chilly in there. So I'm thinking that they're gonna appreciate that. But you never know with a chicken, because they're not going to tell you how they feel about something. So again, I'm doing what I think that I should be doing in every step of the way to keep them healthy, happy and laying. Hopefully we'll see what happens here pretty soon, so in the meantime, we'll check you later. Hope you enjoyed the show. Remember to hit that like button, subscribe whatever you need to do and if you happen to want to support the show, just go to my buzzsprout account, check it out. Give me a little bit of love. Thank you, guys. Talk with you soon.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye that's all we have time for today. I really hope you enjoyed listening to the podcast. Be sure to watch our videos. So, on behalf of my pup, gary, and me, sylvie, thanks for listening.
