Chicken Vision: Week 10

Thanks to Emily for the photo -- you and Leo come back to Austin soon!

David Sedaris on undecided voters

From The New Yorker (link) via Lisa:

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

A new (outdoor) home for the ladybirds

The quintessential Texan name for girls just happens to be the perfect description of our four feathered roommates. Here is the story of the many abodes of Lisa and Grant's ladybirds.

In the beginning, there was a trash can:


Ain't no chicken of mine gonna grow up in a trash can. Next came the plastic Tub o' Poultry. A marked improvement, but only until they learned to fly. Here Zenobia has fashioned a perch out of the heat lamp:


It probably goes without saying that everything went to hell with this plan as soon as all four were flying. They took over the storage room and pooped on everything. We needed to get that poop off our files and into our lawn where it could do some good. And since the temperature outside is fine for little chicks (probably hotter than next to that heat lamp) there was really no reason to delay an outdoor dwelling any further. So, two Sundays ago, we decided to upgrade our little poultry operation and give the girls some outdoor digs.

Scavenging parts was easy since our neighbors are remodeling. I found a wooden crate (I think it held flooring tiles) and pried off planks until we were left with just a basic frame. The removed planks were full of nails, which we extracted and reused. Next came staple-gunning the poultry wire. Here's me touching up the frame after the wire roof was installed:


Lisa, as most readers know, is short. This gave her a significant advantage when it came time to blast a dozen cartridges of staples into the interior wood of the coop to hold down the poultry wire. Her sweltering hour-long sacrifice crouched inside proved to me and the whole neighborhood that yes, she loves her chickens. She muttered things like "Just try and pry this off, racoons!" between staple gun pops. Sadly, this episode was not photographed.

The theory behind our structure is that of the chicken tractor, a portable chicken house with no floor. It allows chickens access to the soil and offers protection from predators. It also keeps the crazy things in one place. Furthermore, it can be moved from spot to spot so that the chickens don't wear out any one square of lawn too bad. If desired, you can also leave them in one place a bit longer to prepare it for gardening. They will defoliate, aerate, and leave "fertilizer" all over a piece of dirt. If you decide to build one yourself, don't forget that critters can (and will) dig to get a tasty chicken dinner. We nailed two-by-fours to the base so that they laid flat on the ground, meaning any digging predator would have to dig in four inches. That is probably enough of a deterrent for our tractor's purpose as a daytime house.

We toasted our accomplishment with Chad and Lizzie. Here's the finished product (total cost: about $8 for wire and hardware), doubling as a handy table for the celebratory ales:


Next, I want to enclose a third of the cage's area so the chickens have somewhere to go at night. In the meantime, we will continue bringing them in to the Tub o'Poultry each night in our ritual game of chase-the-hen.