Extreme Home Makeover - Hen House Edition

I posted last week about our hens going on strike and not laying eggs and how we temporarily installed a light in the hen house to help give them a few more "daylight" hours so that perhaps we'd get eggs in the cold, gloomy, dark days of winter.  We got that done last week.  A day afterward - no eggs.  Two days afterward, no eggs.  Three days afterward - you guessed it, no eggs.

Tricia and I were talking about doing a little renovation to the hen house to solve a sanitary issue we were dealing with in the hen house.  We have nesting boxes that line about half of each interior wall on each side.  The hens, when they are laying, fill those boxes with eggs.  But there is something else they do in the laying boxes - they roost on them at night and poop in them.  They are not good house keepers.  It also means extra work for Benjamin as he has to clean some of the eggs that get poop on them.  If you wash the eggs, it reduces the shelf life as it removes the "bloom" or protective covering that the hen excretes on the eggs to keep bacteria from entering the eggs' pores.

But we have a plan that we enacted to mitigate this problem.  We decided to build some doors that cover the boxes during the night time hours.  If this renovation is successful, the hay in the boxes will stay clean.  Each morning after we finish milking, we'd open the laying box doors and they'd be able to lay.  A while back, a friend had given me some old cabinet doors that he was throwing away.  I figured they might work.  I pulled them out of the rafters of the barn and measured them.  They fit perfectly!  I only had four hinges on hand, but I figured that if I would 'tie' all the doors together with some wood strips, I would only need four hinges - two on one side and two on the other.  We removed all of the soiled hay and poop and composted it in the garden.  Then we filled with fresh hay.  It ain't pretty, but you can see the finished work below.  The doors are open and that signals the hens that it is time to clock in and get to work laying eggs.

Here is the nesting box door on the other side in the closed position.  In the evening when we feed and separate the cows, we close the doors.  The hens will roost on top of the boxes and poop on them.  The nice thing is that the doors open toward the middle of the hen house, allowing all the poop to fall to the middle of the hen house.  The hay inside the boxes is kept fresh and clean.  The eggs are spotless.  You can see how the wood strips tie the 3 cabinet doors together, allowing two door hinges on either side to do the trick.

Here is the other side in the closed position.

Like Motel 6, we leave the lights on for ya (the hens), but so far no eggs.  The inventory of eggs dwindles.  The clock ticks...  Tick tock, tick tock. 

While I was building the nesting box doors, I looked at the ceiling and the rafters was filled with cobwebs.  I've never cleaned it.  Cobwebs aren't all bad.  One time, we de-horned a calf and the blood vessel in the horns would not stop bleeding.  In the middle of the night, I went to check on the calf and there was a puddle of blood where she was bleeding!  We called the veterinarian at night and he told us about an old remedy to stop bleeding:  He instructed us to pack the area bleeding with cobwebs and they would stop bleeding.  We did it and it worked! 

Having a few cobwebs around is sort of like a first aid kit.  But we had more than enough cobwebs.  It was time to spruce things up.  I got the broom and put on a mask and safety glasses and began sweeping all the cobwebs down.  It was time-consuming work, pulling the cobwebs off the broom.  The hens gathered and ate the spiders that fell.  It was a happy time for the hens.  Not so much for me.  Finally, though, the hen house was clean.

The hens were happy, I think.  So happy that they laid two eggs!  You can see them in the bottom left hand corner of the picture below.

But I still have a mystery to solve.  Did they begin laying because of the light?  Or was it the clean nesting boxes?  Or perhaps a high protein diet of spiders?  Too many variables.  All I know is that the hens are putting their picket signs down and slowly beginning to lay eggs again.  That's something to crow about!

One More Trick To Try to Get the Hens Laying Again

Yesterday we talked about our hens suddenly stopping laying eggs.  I think it is largely a nutritional deficit, but part of the egg deficit is no doubt due to short days with gloomy, overcast weather.  A chicken needs 14 hours of daylight in order to lay eggs.  Okay, we're going to do something that goes against everything we've always said to help 'jump start' the hens into laying eggs for us.

We're putting a light in the hen house.  GASP!  We have always felt that artificial lighting is what the big egg producers do with their 'warehouse hens' to keep the eggs going 24/7 365.  We want to be more natural with our birds, allowing them a rest.  In doing so, it has given our chickens a long life.  Chickens have a finite amount of eggs that they will lay inside them when they hatch.  If you keep them in an artificial lighted facility, their productive life will be over in a short period of time. 

So that made me wonder, how many eggs can a chicken lay?  I found THIS ARTICLE that said the hen's laying lifetime depends on many things: breed, feed, environment, etc.  The Department of Agriculture puts the figure for American birds at 276 eggs per year.  Due to the rest I spoke about in the first two paragraphs, a backyard chicken in England lived a very long life and squeezed out her last eggs at the remarkable age of 17!  Wow.  As far as a prolific layer, a chicken named Cornell Endurance died when she was 12, having laid 1,232 eggs.

Our hens are old.  I really don't know how old since I don't mark them to track their ages.  We replace about 20 each year with new birds for the ones that die or get eaten by predators.  It would be interesting to know how old our oldest chicken is.  We've had them for about 16 years now. 

Here is the light that we put in the hen house to hopefully encourage them to lay:

As soon as the days get longer and they begin to lay, we'll turn it off.  It is merely a heat lamp that we've replaced the heat bulb with a regular 75 watt incandescent bulb.

We're eagerly awaiting them to start laying.  Our inventory of eggs is down to about 60 eggs now.  C'mon hens!  We'll call your hen house Motel 6 and "we'll leave the light on for ya!"

Putting the Chickens on A High Protein Diet

Our hens have been laying steadily, even through the shorter days with less sunlight.  In past years, their egg production has shut down to virtually none for a month or two during the winter.  Everything was going well until...  We left for a couple of days during the holidays to visit family and when we returned, the hens stopped laying.  It is as if they decided to go on strike and march around with picket signs.

The light definitely does play a role in the diminishing number of eggs we're collecting.  A hen needs 14 hours of daylight to lay eggs.  The number of hours of daylight should be increasing now since we've passed winter solstice.  The other factor is nutrition.  Normally, our hens roam around on 3 acres of land scratching for bugs, worms, and tasty morsels they find scratching through the cow poop.  During the winter, the number of bugs and worms for them to eat goes down considerably.  Besides the hen scratch and laying pellets we feed them, they are looking for things to eat in order to supplement the bugs and worms that were more prevalent in the spring and summer.

Today I found the holy grail of protein for them!  I was splitting some firewood and look what I found:

The larvae of a beetle that bores into oak trees burrows holes in the wood, eating the wood and getting big, fat, and juicy.

Can you see their tunnels?

As I split the log open, giant worms spill out.  You can see one in the hen's mouth, two on the ground beneath the log and one curled up in its burrowed out tunnel in the log.

Here's a closer photo of it.

While these worms look gross to you and me, there is nothing that excites a chicken more than the sight in the photo below!

After I swing my ax and expose more worms to the chickens, I step back in awe as I watch the hens devour the worms.  The worms are much too large to eat in one bite, so the hens grab one in their beak and run off.  The race is on though, because the other hens want to eat what they've got.  They don't want to share, so they race off in the pasture. 

Other hens' patience pays off as I swing my ax again and more worms spill out, providing tasty treats for the hens.  It is similar to a pinata!  Hopefully this additional protein will supplement their nutrient deficiency and encourage them to begin laying once more.  We only have 6 dozen eggs in inventory left.  We don't want to have to buy eggs from the store with 100 hens in the pasture.