Yipe! Starting a couple of weeks ago, something was killing my chickens, as many as five per night. This is not only heartbreaking, it's the sort of thing that can leave you with no chickens at all in very short order.

The dead chickens were in various places, but always on the fenced pasture, or so I supposed. A strong predator like a bobcat can leap a fence with a dead chicken in its mouth, leaving nothing behind but a splash of feathers where the kill took place. Coyotes are much the same. Hawks and owls eat the chickens without moving them, and raccoons will go either way, sometimes dragging the dead chicken long distances, sometimes not moving them at all.

I searched the perimeter of the fence and found no obvious game trails leading onto my chicken pasture, which made me wonder if I didn't have a problem with owls. I readjusted the electric fence to make sure there were no high or low spots where a raccoon could squeeze through. Making a truly raccoon-proof fence is difficult, because, unlike other animals, they have no fear and probe the fence for weak spots. I found one trail leading to where a chicken had been killed outside the fence. Otherwise, nothing.

Next, I pulled out my snares. I don't like using snares except on a well-defined game trail that's leading straight to my chickens, since I have no quarrel with critters that are leaving my chickens alone. I started with the one trail leading to a chicken kill, and put a couple more in likely spots. After several nights I had caught two raccoons, and the predation ceased.

I'd lost many more chickens than could possibly be eaten by two raccoons. This doesn't mean that there were lots more chicken-eating predators: it means that the raccoons killed far more than they could eat. Nature is neither nice nor efficient!

I used to rely on the federal trapper for this sort of thing, but Benton County has become very stingy on supplying matching funds to the wildlife control program, and this has taken a toll on everyone's livestock. So I learned how to do trapping myself. Snares are particularly easy to use, and if you do it right, cause no collateral damage. As I said, you want to find a trail that's used exclusively by predators who are commuting to what they imagine is a 24-hour chicken buffet. I learned most of my techniques from the works of Hal Sullivan. His snaring book and video are unpretentious but good. I recommend that you buy both, and his snaring starter kit, if you have a predator problem. This is the sort of activity where you want to exercise due care from the start.

I don't like snares very much, but it's a lot better than having all your chickens killed. I'm responsible for the well-being of my chickens, while the predators are quite literally crossing the line to get at them: they have to brave an electric fence.

Staying up all night and shooting the predators is an option if you can manage it: I can't pull all-nighters anymore. Some people have excellent luck with livestock guardian dogs, which intimidate predators. But fencing alone generally isn't enough.

Here's something you don't see every day. On my morning walk, I noticed that someone had driven a screwdriver deep into the trunk of a tree:

It's about six feet off the ground. Pounding it in must have been mighty inconvenient.

What could the purpose be? If I pull the screwdriver out of the tree, do I become King of the Loggers?

I'm afraid to try!

Let's go nuts and do it all again! Last week I auctioned off a full set of Norton Creek Press titles (thirteen in all), which sold for low prices, with savings ranging from 10% to 99.93% of full price -- one book sold for a penny!

So a bunch of people got great bargains, especially considering how good these books are (I won't publish a book I don't love). And I'm doing it again this week. Why? I think that a consistent presence in eBay auctions will eventually attract enough bidders that prices will become reasonable. So far, though, it's a bargain-hunter's paradise.

So check out my auctions. Christmas is coming! Buy books for your friends and don't let them know you got them at a bargain price!

A lot of us live in climates that are mild enough that "winter pasture" is a valid concept. If you can manage to keep a green range going all winter, you can achieve that grass-fed goodness year-round. So what kind of winter pasture works best?

Cool-season grasses for free-range chickens. Traditionally, cool-season grasses have worked very well, with cereal grains (oat, wheat, and barley) providing good, reliable, palatable, rugged, nutritious cool-season ground cover. Here in Western Oregon, it's not too late to plant such things. A lot of people live in warmer climates than I do, and they'll have even better luck.

The problem with these annual grasses is that they die in the summertime, so you'll want to sow something else by the time the cool-season annuals start to give up the ghost. This is where a grass-legume mixture shines, since clovers do very well in the season where cool-season annuals don't.

Perennial grasses for free-range chickens. I haven't seen any perennial grasses that leap out of the ground after a fall sowing the way wheat and oats do, but of course they don't turn up their toes and die as soon as summer arrives, which is a bonus.

Permanent pasture for free-range chickens. Having a pasture ecosystem with a maximum amount of biodiviversity, that is tuned to your local micro-climate, sounds pretty good, doesn't it? This is what happens on permanent pasture, where you never plow, and just accept whatever grows. All you do is mow (and re-seed bare spots). Start with whatever will create a good ground cover quickly, and allow other species to creep in. You'll soon have a mix of multiple grasses and legumes. That's what I do.

Grass height for free-range chickens. chickens are fairly low-slung. Tall grass restricts their movements, provides concealment for predators, and gives them opportunities to lay eggs where you'll never find them. There was some research done on the topic of grass height, way back when (don't have the reference handy, sorry), and cutting the pasture at two inches worked best. Six inches was too high.

It's not edible if it's not green. Chickens will happily eat bright green pasture plants, but when the green starts to fade and the plants go woody, they lose interest.

Happy pasturing!

What do you do when your chickens start to lose all their feathers? Nothing, if it's fall. They're molting and look revolting. Nothing you can do about it.

Chickens grow a new set of feathers every year, usually in the fall, so they're ready for cold weather. They can also molt in response to stress.

My older hens are in various stages of molt. Many of them are missing the feathers on their necks, others are missing wing and tail feathers, and a few over-achievers are missing both. In most cases, unsightly pinfeathers (the stubs of the new, emerging feathers) are making them look even worse.

Hens generally stop laying during the molt, which is why the fall is the worst season of the year for egg production. Winter is actually better, so long as you keep the water flowing and the feeders full and the hens aren't exposed to too much wind or rain.

In the commercial confinement industry, the hens tend to get seriously overweight, and they lack the environmental cues that outdoor hens get, so their bodies tend not to realize that it's molting season. Getting them back into trim sometimes requires that their water be withheld for several days and always requires that they be given little or no feed for up to two weeks. But we've never had these problems on free range.

Some people think you should feed hens extra-high protein diets during the molt, but I've never seen the point (or any research supporting it). A diet that will support high egg production will support high feather production.

[Update: the links actually work now!]

I invited all 4,400+ subscribers to my monthly poultry newsletter to join the Grass-Fed Eggs discussion group, and then the fun began.

It turns out that Google Groups will let you sign up without having a Google account, but if you do, you can't change your subscription options. And the default subscription option is "send me every posting as a separate email message," which -- because the group has become lively -- is too many email messages for most people.

And to add insult to injury, Google Groups managed to double-subscribe a lot of people under two different email addresses. How, I have no idea. People who were dual-subscribed could edit the options of only one of these, leaving the other one blasting them unwanted emails. Sigh.

This has pretty much blown over now.

In general, I think the problem revolves around bugs in the "invite new members" feature, and there are similar problems for people who subscribe via email rather than through the Google Groups Web site. If you use the Web site, you should have no problems.

So when you join the group, do yourself a favor and subscribe via the link, using the Google Groups Web interface, and not with the hokey email subscription mechanism. This requires that you have a Google account. If you use more than one email address, set the email options in your Google account to let Google know this, and you won't have any trouble. And set your subscription to "Daily Email Digest." It's the best compromise for most people.

It turns out the Google Groups are notorious for being sadly neglected, as discussed in this article from Wired. I had decided to put my discussion forum on Google Groups because I was tired of the long, slow decline in quality in Yahoo Groups. Just goes to show.

Fall brooding is at least as easy as spring brooding, and maybe easier. The weather is usually drier. The season is winding down, so there are fewer demands on your time. And there's plenty of time for the chickens to become fully feathered and completely winter-hardy before the nasty weather sets in.

Pullet chicks brooded in October will be in full lay by April.

Mostly, fall brooding is just like spring brooding. If you've been brooding all summer long, you'll need to drop your warm-weather habits and remember how you did things in early spring.

Some tips:

• Many hatcheries hatch year-round, but the off-season selection is smaller: mostly commercial strains. That's okay. Buy your high-producing hybrids in the fall, and your exotic breeds in the spring.
• When in doubt, buy from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. I buy all my chicks there. Mostly Red Sex-Links, but their Barred Rocks are very nice birds.
• Take a good look at your brooder before the chicks arrive. If you're using heat lamps, always use two or more, never just one. You can get heat lamps as small as 100W, or you can use floodlight bulbs instead of heat lamps, so you can use more bulbs without using more electricity. (I've stopped using 250w bulbs. Too hot. Two 125w heat lamps or 150w floodlights are better.)
• Remember to use a brooder guard this time, even if it was too hot in the summer.
• Beware of rats. Fall is a good time to replenish your bait stations (I like the big weatherproof Eaton Rat Fortress bait stations). Yes, I know poison isn't nice, but having rats eat your baby chicks is far worse.
• Have a plan for dealing with the chicks when they get big. Don't assume that you'll magically come up with a winter henhouse for a group of chicks once they outgrow the brooder house. Winter construction projects need advance planning. At a minimum, plan to keep the chicks in the brooder house, and allow two square feet per chick.
• If you need to bould a new henhouse for your new flock, read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, the only book that gets the basics of chicken-house construction right.
• If the chicks are going to be confined most of the winter, buy a non-cannibalistic strain of chicken. Crowding tends to bring on outbreaks of cannibalism, while free range tends to cure them -- but range often isn't available in the winter unless you're in a mild or hot climate.
• Last but not least, buy a copy of my book, Success With Baby Chicks, which goes into all the considerations very thoroughly.

All of which makes a long and slightly intimidating list, but when you do things by the numbers, your fall brooding will go like clockwork. Try it and see!

Our new brooder house, described in a previous post, is now close to completion. Its main architectural feature is a concrete floor and concrete pony wall to make it ratproof and rotproof. It'll probably be standing 100 years from now with minimal maintenance. We put broad eaves front and back to keep the rain away from the building. We'll add rigid foam insulation from a stash we discovered in the barn (thank you, previous owners!). In our climate, insulation is optional in a brooder house, but it's nice to have.

A word about the siting of the brooder house: it's facing north, with trees to the south of it. With a regular chicken house, in our cool climate, you'd want to spin the whole setup around 180 degrees -- house facing south, with trees to the north -- because it's hardly ever too hot for chickens. But with a brooder house, you want to avoid wild temperature swings and exposure to storms. A northern exposure has steadier (though cooler) temperatures, and the storms in our neck of the woods come up mostly from the south, so the site is protected. The brooders themselves, heated by heat lamps, make up for any deficiencies the site provides in the way of temperature and light.

The roof is ordinary corrugated steel roofing over plywood. The roofing is thin and cheap but should last at least 30 years with no maintenance, and maybe twice that long.

The brooder house is big. We'd need a building permit, or at least an agricultural exemption, for anything bigger than 200 square feet. The house is 196 square feet. We can easily brood 200 pullet chicks for six weeks. This gives us a theoretical capacity of 1,600 chicks per year, far more than the 600 or so we actually plan on brooding. On the farm, over-capacity equates to freedom. It put you in charge of your schedule, rather than having it dictated by your equipment.

The door hasn't been hung yet, but it's a spiffy old beast with a lot of glass.

The three windows would not be enough on a henhouse, but will be fine for a brooder house, where the chicks need more shelter and less ventilation.

(If you haven't already, you want to check out the sample chapters of Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, to get the pitch for highly ventilated chicken coops for all seasons. The book has interesting things to say about brooder houses as well. Though it's from 1924, it's the best poultry housing book on the market, because it's the only one that gets the fundamentals right.)

If you're in a part of the country where the grass goes away or is buried under snow in the winter, how can you achieve your goal of grass-fed eggs? And if it's twenty below and a gale is blowing, are free-range eggs really a good idea?

It's easy to get hung up on definitions and take things too literally, but we ought to allow reality to intrude, at least a little bit. We don't want our chickens going outside when it's unhealthy for them to do so, and it would be stupid and irresponsible to do so just so we could cling to labels like "free-range" or "grass-fed." Climate happens.

We are blessed with a wealth of practical information about such things if we know where to look. Back before scientists figured out about vitamins, everyone knew that poultry needed green feed year-round. They just didn't know why. So they worked out a variety of ways to keep green feed in the picture, regardless of weather.

Some contenders were:

• Vegetables. Carrots, kale, and lettuce are good, cabbage less so. Kale was particularly popular in the Pacific states, since it can be left standing in the field all winter and nothing will happen to it. The others were stored in the usual ways. Of course, these days such vegetables are available fresh year-round, and maybe you can get them for free through the discards of your local supermarket.
• Lawn clippings are an obvious substitute for grass range, though of course they aren't available except in weather where the chickens might just as easily go outdoors. In this modern age, maybe it's practical to freeze lawn clippings if you only have a few hens. Grass clippings are also practical if your chickens can't range widely (a lot of neighborhoods would tolerate chickens in the back yard but not the front, for example).
• Hay. Alfalfa meal, alfalfa hay, and clover hay are all good and can be stored indefinitely. Alfalfa products are easy to find, too.
• Sprouted grain. Greatly beloved by some people, there's a lot of skepticism in the poultry literature. Not green and leafy enough to do much in the "green feed" line, and way too labor-intensive -- that's the verdict.

Feeding methods varied. Whole kale plants were often uprooted and hung upside down from a piece of twine, just above the floor, so the chickens could peck at the leaves. Similarly, farmers drove spikes into the chicken house walls and spiked cabbage and lettuce heads on them. Others thought that slicing the green feed made it more palatable, so they bought slicers or shredders and fed the cole-slaw-like shredded greens in troughs. Alfalfa pellets or cubes are probably more palatable if you soak them for a while first. Hay can be fed in troughs or hay nets. Tossing it on the ground is wasteful.

Basically, you give the chickens as much as they want, or, with wet feeds, as much as they can eat before it freezes. If they have green range available, they won't like alfalfa hay, etc., but when the range becomes barren or inaccessible, their attitude will change.

Do it right, and your eggs will have a spring-like flavor year-round.

It's been cold out for a few mornings in a row, so I've built fires in the wood stove.

We alternate between heating the house entirely with wood and heating it mostly with wood. We have access to free wood from the neighboring Starker Forest (one of the many elements of their good-neighbor policy), so wood heat is especially attractive for us.

If cheap cordwood isn't an option, sometimes you can find very inexpensive scrap wood. Nail-free scraps, such as you get from a pallet factory, are better than construction or demolition scraps. We used to get pallet scraps for $60 a cord. These were bone-dry and were really useful if our cordwood wasn't well-aged.

One thing I've learned in my research is that starting fires in wood stoves is a lot easier if you use some cardboard along with the newspaper and kindling. Turns the whole thing from an iffy proposition into a slam-dunk. I learned this from this extension publication. Your tax dollars at work.