Big Island Chickens

Eggs! Well, Egg! Lots happening but one of the girls gave us our first egg! We got them, our hens, just 11 days ago and after all the reading, we expected to have to wait a bit longer. What, with all the stress of re-location, wing clipping, internment inside the coop for a week neither JoAnn nor I thought it would happen for another week or so at least.  But here it is, I half expected a mis-shapen thing but then remembered these were proven layers, granted, this statement may have been an overzealous sales pitch from the old owner, but it is egg shaped and beautiful. It is also small. I haven't researched the size parameters of eggs yet, but when compared to the ones in the carton in our fridge, it is small.  JoAnn and I both heard the hens futzing around this morning, but when we checked on them no eggs. This afternoon about one-ish we again heard the cackling of a hen but thought nothing of it. At 2:30 I went out to paint part of the pen where I had welded i...

Chickens! They are Acclimating Last post we had recover one of the three that escaped and we were working on making a fully enclosed aviary out of our coop and run. Well, as an update, we have recovered one more bird for a total of five, this one was the hen with the un-clipped wing that started the exodus. We wired up the pop door exits so we could finish securing the netting and also try to get the girls used to roosting in the coop rather than trying to get to the trees like they were used to.  The trick to covering the pen was that to save drilling into the lava, I chose to use two side of the coop as one of the corners of the pen. When we poled the pen to raise the netting to 10 feet, it meant that we had a zone over the coop that was tough to secure. I ended up stapling the netting to the gable fascia and trimming it to neaten the look, I have yet to run a cover trim along the raw net edge, but that can be for another day.  I extended the top of the gate, we...

We Have Chickens The Adventure starts Or, Bum Rushed by a bird.  We went to pick up our 6 new chickens yesterday and made the trek to Mountain View. With a newly made transport cage we braved the roads (if you can call them that) into the Mountain View area of Hawaii. For those that don't know it, this place is tropical forest. Most lots are at least 3 acres and since many are owned by off islanders, they tend too be overgrown or virgin lands, untouched by development. This means the animals that run in these lots are feral, and that included our 'semi'-tame chickens. The man we bought them from caught them the day before and held them in a large tote, comfortable, but snug. Ready and waiting for us and their transport.  Money and chickens exchanged, we made the 40 minute ride home, planning how we were going to release almost wild, 2 year old hens used to roosting in the trees each evening into a pen that has only 5 foot fences.  Our naivete got the best ...

Nest Box and More Too many spaces, not enough chickens! Chalk it up to being a newbie chicken coop designer, or wanting to have the opportunity to expand the coop for more birds, or my eagerness, but I made a space of 24" x 72" to be split into two levels of six boxes per level. With the conventional chicken Math (explanation of the phenomenon of Chicken Math is coming in a future post) of 3-4 birds per nest I would have room for 48 chickens! However, this does not  jive with CMath tenet #4 which is 4 square feet per bird, or a total of 16 birds for the floor space I have right now.  I then went back to the drawing board and came up with this new plan. You can see in the photo I have 5 boxes with storage above and vertical storage next to them. Hinged lids and doors create the access to each of the three areas. Each of the nest boxes have a plastic tote for cleaning and routine sterilization. With the outer door access daily egg collection and replacement of the beddin...

Installation Time Or, the real business of Construction Okay, the garage build was prep time for making panels, now is the time I consider that the real building got started.  I didn't take a lot of Photos so it looks like a lot happened, which it did. Making each wall a panel allowed for fast assembly. This photo shows the piers in place and the floor set on them. It was sturdy, but a bit too wobbly for me knowing I had a few more feet of building going up soon. So I then cut (2) 2x4 braces for each pier and screwed them in using 3" gold screws, not real gold, but they are called that. Not sure why other than their color. We then attached the linoleum.  Sure we risked it getting damaged from adding this early, but by placing it under the bottom plates of all the walls, we figured less water penetration into the floor this way. So far so good- no big gouges yet. These walls went up in less than 20 minutes and I was working alone this day. By allowing an overhang...

Walls, Rafters and more Well, it's now time for the walls, so in making the choice to build modular units, I decided each wall would be a 4' x 8' unit. The floor is a double unit at 8' x 8', and each gable end, though not rectangular, would still be a roughly 4' x 8' unit each.  I am sometimes thinking faster than I can write things down (which means I forget a lot of the ideas I have) so I naturally assigned a name to each unit. Yeah, a bit simple, but this way I would always know which wall needed work, and what parts went where. I built this coop about 200 feet from the eventual placement site in our carport. I did this so I could work on the coop even when it was raining at the site. After I framed then skinned each wall unit with plywood, I painted each one with two coats of exterior paint. Inner side is white, outer side is light yellow. All exterior trim will also be white. I figured that it would be easier to paint while a 4 x 8 unit than in pla...

Our Chicken Coop Build Part One- Site Selection, Piers, and Floor  So on our property, the 'South Forty' is actually on the North end. This is a lava flow with a bit of  topsoil on it and will be great for letting the chickens scratch around.  We laid it out and used hammer and stone chisel to a rough level. We planned on raising the coop 24" off the ground so the chickens will  so we needed 9 posts to raise it up. This is pier and post and we needed 9 piers as well. The bolted piers were for the perimeter, the three without bolts are for the center of the floor. Cinder blocks filled with concrete was the logical choice. Once the pads for the legs of the coop were leveled, we cut the legs out of 4 x 4 stock. Since the floor would be made of 2 x 4's, we notched the tops to get the best fit. I drilled out the bottom to fit the nut and bolt better. We set out the piers on their pads, the got started on the floor. It sill looks like they are...

It Begins JoAnn and I retired to Hawaii, dream of a lifetime, right? Retirement in paradise. Well, the life in paradise is expensive. One of the higher costs here is at the grocery store. The high prices of meat has gotten us to rethink how we want to go about providing for ourselves here. Among the other choices we've made, we want to raise chickens. So the first order of business is to get a working egg and meat production coop up and running. We want to have both egg and meat provided from our future flock, and figuring out how many birds of each to have has proven to be vexing. I'll cover the thinking process in subsequent posts, as chicken math takes on a life of it's own. Those that know what I mean will be smiling, those that don't are invited to take the trip with us on our adventure to find out just what 'Chicken Math' is and how it corrupts. I'll be devoting an entire post just for that subject so I'll skip to the second step.  So the fi...