Rhode Island Red x New Hampshire

Ordering two chickens over the phone became five chickens in person when I saw them all crowded into their cages on the back of a truck this morning. Then, once I saw them in the chicken run, I realized they were jailbirds - caged birds. So it is satisfying to offer them a life pecking around the Merewether Life backyard. Just hope everyone can get along now there are 10 birds in all.

You can see more about our Backyard chickens at these posts...

Good Morning Chickens

Keeping Chickens in the Backyard


Gold Laced Wyandottes

Taming of the Chickens

Chickens Chickens Chickens

Free at last, just have to pick up this scratch scratch peck dance

The big chicken truck had cages stacked six high (I didn't have my camera so no images) filled with feathers, red, brown and black. The chickens were silent and almost motionless, just tilting their heads and blinking from inside their cages. Even the cage with a few big roosters was still, with just one swivelling his head to clean a feather on his shoulder.

They stayed together like they were still in a cage

There were a dozen or so people lined up and the old bloke in front of me told me he was getting four birds. The four he had at home were getting old and laying less.
"So I chop their heads off and throw 'em in the garbage" he said.

Once I got back to Merewether Life, I put the box in the chicken run and opened the flaps. Nothing. I lifted the edge of the box and they stayed put, so I lifted it even more and could feel the weight shift as they slid out onto the ground. They fell together and just stayed there, blinking in the sunlight. So I moved towards them and they fluttered up with a wing flap or two, then fell down and landed on their sides, awkwardly. It was obvious they were not used to being on the ground, or having the space for flapping their wings. You can see the tail feathers are all frayed from the cage.

You can see the frayed tail feathers on this big red bird

Will be interesting to see how the Rhode Island Red / New Hampshires adapt to the new living arrangements and settle into the pecking order with the Black Australorps.

Backyard Chickens In Merewether

Here's how I spent the few free days I had over the Easter long weekend. There was a fair bit of rain and the soil was soft, so digging the footings wasn't so hard, more that it just had to be done. So, with a skirt of chicken wire extending out from the coop by about 500mm, it should be quite a strong defence against the foxes.



Then the wire sits buried under 300mm of trench, backfilled with bricks, and then covered with finer wire and then filled in with concrete. It looks very solid and I hope it cures properly with all the sporadic rain and showers.

The corner posts are a bit messy, but whilst i was putting it together I thought it was more about function and security as opposed to form and design. For sure, the brick work isn't the tidiest or neatest, but it holds the wire in place wll so will be a firm deterrent to marauding foxes.

The chicken coop has a gentle downward slope away from the house so the waste has a clear run off. I initially planned on making the coop a third of its final size, and you can see the original trench I had dug across - it was stopped by thick tree roots from the eucalypts. I'm not sure if having the big tree inside the coop was such a good idea.

Anyway, more refinements and improvements as time goes on, am getting anxious to have some actual birds in the coop laying eggs for us!  Gourmet Hampers