This spring I ordered 27 birds from Murray McMurray Hatchery. They added two to the order, and 29 were delivered near the end of April. We lost one on the fourth day, but the rest are doing well – 28 nine-week-old chickens living in our backyard.
Our attempts at landscaping around the coop haven't been very successful yet. I'm seriously considering dumping foot-deep mulch all around the outsides.
There's one barred rock cockerel who seems to be growing up fast. At nine weeks old, he practices crowing every morning around 4:30. We call him Barred Rock Hudson. They're still very young, and barely adolescent, but Barred Rock Hudson appears to be the dominant male.
The second-in-command is a New Hampshire cockerel who's significantly larger than Hudson, but seems to back down whenever they have a confrontation. I've taken to calling him Rooster Cogburn.
Murray McMurray includes a "Bonus/Free Exotic Chick" in their orders, so we have a Polish cockerel as well. When he was only a couple days old, he looked like he a pre-revolutionary French courtier in a ridiculous wig, so we took to calling him King Louis. Now he honestly looks more like a punk rocker, so perhaps he's more "Louie" than "Louis". The poor guy has his head pecked mercilessly by the others, but we're afraid seperating him will do more harm than good, so we keep coating his head with balm.
All told, we have five cockerels, although it's possible another is lurking in there. But Hudson, Cogburn, and Louis seem to be the three at the top. There are two more smaller New Hampshire cockerels, but they seem to be pretty timid. Louis is definitely lower on the pecking order than Hudson or Cogburn, but I've seen him stare down almost everyone else.
The plan is to let the chickens roam freely during the day, but so far I've been limiting their "free range" time to a couple hours in the evening. The cockerels are still quite small, and still don't seem to understand their role in the flock. There's a lot of predator pressure out here, and I'm not quite ready to delegate the care of the flock to them yet.
So I end up doing some of their free ranging for them: pretty much every weed I pull up I toss into their coop to see whether it interests them. They definitely won't eat thistles (which is a pity), but they love dandelion, milkweed, and clover. The jury's still out on sourgrass, and as much as they like hawkweed, I'm letting them find it themselves: it's too hard to pick.
I now spend a lot of time making salads for my chickens.
They do seem to love their salads. And it's not too hard to figure out what they don't like – they leave that on the floor of the coop.
