Winter is right around the corner, and what does this mean for your chickens?

For me, in the mild Pacific Nortwest climate, only 40 miles from the ocean, winter is not that big a deal, all things considered. The waterers freeze sometimes, and we get snow once or twice a year, but weather that actually bothers the hens? Doesn't happen.

The rule of thumb is that chickens that can keep dry will keep producing and be in fine health so long as the daytime highs are mostly above freezing, and will stay healthy down to twenty below if they can stay dry and out of the wind. In both cases, of course, they need plenty of feed to keep warm. So for many of us, winter is not an "OMG!" moment, just another thing to deal with.

I've written a Winter Chicken Care FAQ page.

I've also written a page on keeping your chickens' water from freezing, which for me is the biggest wintertime nuisance.

The needs of winter housing are different from the summer, though probably not as different as you think! I've republished Dr. Woods' Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, and if you follow the link you can read the sample chapter to realize that this is an intriguing book! (and one of my perennial best-sellers).

This winter I won't be using lights on my hens, who I think are too exposed to the weather to benefit from them. I think lights are a good idea for most flocks if you need more winter eggs. And a lot of chicken coops are awfully dark in the winter without them!

It's harvest season, so gardeners have more produce and garden waste than they know what to do with. A few neighbors see my flock of chickens as a handy way to ensure that nothing goes to waste, without having to actually eat over-ripe or oversized produce.

Feeding scraps to your chickens isn't rocket science, and there are only a few rules:

• Don't feed anything rotten to the chickens. Chickens will usually turn up their beaks at anything unwholesome, but let's not take many chances. Mushy apples are okay, and a mold spot here and there will just be avoided by them. Don't feed them anything that smells funny!
• Don't take away their chicken feed. You get into trouble when feeding surplus and scraps and waste to chickens by trying to force them to eat it. Chickens like variety and like unprocessed food, and they have a pretty good "nutritional appetite," so they'll eat at least as much of anything new as they should. If you keep their chicken feed available, you won't poison or malnourish them with ill-considered offerings.
• Remove anything that attracts flies and rats. When feeding things that will attract unwanted visitors, don't offer the chickens more than they will eat in a short time. Since you often don't know how much this will be, be prepared to take away the leftovers soon after feeding.
• Slice or break open things with thick skins, like squashes. Chickens can't handle the rind but love what's inside.
• Be aware that most waste and scraps have few calories. Vegetables and garbage, for example, usually have very few calories per pound. Vitamins, yes; calories, no. Calories are concentrated mostly in grains and fats, which usually aren't what people are pressing on you.
• If you have a lot more scraps than your chickens can handle, consider pigs. Pigs are better than chickens at dealing with agricultural surplus, if only because they eat so much more!

Want to learn more about feeding your chickens?
And I have more blog and web site articles about chicken feed!

But what you really need, if you want to sink your teeth into the topic, is a copy of Heuser's Feeding Poultry. I republished this book because there wasn't anything good and accessible in print. In addition to discussing everything you can imagine, it covers topics like green feed and feeding scraps.

If you've had chickens for a while, you loathe raccoons. If not, you will. Here's why:

A while ago we started losing 1-3 chickens a night. Some were completely eaten, others barely touched. This is one of the more infuriating aspects of predators: they don't have an "off" switch. Instead, they keep killing until they run out of targets.

In the wild, their prey scatters and the predators only get one or two victims. But a fox or a raccoon that squeezes into a closed henhouse will kill your entire flock.

That's one reason I use open housing — no doors, and one side open — so the chickens can scatter. (Open-front housing has other advantages, which you'll see when you read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses.)

How did the raccoon get in, in spite of my electric fence? Different ways, it appears. There was only one well-defined game trail, but when I adjusted the electric fence so that anything using it would surely get zapped, the losses continued. Raccoons have no fear. A dog or coyote that gets zapped by an electric fence will never come near it again, but raccoons will prowl it endlessly, looking for spots where it can squeeze under. They can squeeze pretty flat, and if you put the fence wire too low, it shorts out. Farming sounds so easy! But I'm sure  you agree that farming is no panacea.

When adjusting the fence didn't work, I set snares. Snares are pretty easy to use, and by placing them only on game trails heading towards your all-night chicken buffet,  you can see how they can be very selective,  nabbing only the miscreants. After a few nights of nothing, we caught a single raccoon. And the losses stopped.

All that carnage from one smallish animal? Don't tell me Nature is kind!

In the bad old days, there was a Federal bounty on just about anything that moved, including raccoons. And old-timer told me that the bounty and the price of pelts paid for his pack of coon hounds. One result was that chicken and sheep farmers had little to fear from predators.

When the bounty dried up in the Seventies, so did the hunting and trapping, and the raccoons, bobcats, and coyotes became an ever-increasing threat. Even since I started raising chickens in 1996, things have gotten much worse. Benton County keeps cutting the amount they're willing to chip in as matching funds for the Federal predator control program — which only targets animals that are actively killing livestock — with predictable results: If you don't learn all about electric fences and snares,  your chickens are goners. It's almost as bad in town as it is in the country!

Karen and Dan were moving a batch of pullets from the brooder house onto the pasture one evening, and saw three rats scurrying around. You know what that means: if you see three in the open, there must be thirty in hiding somewhere!

We usually don't have much trouble with rats on the pasture. Our chicken feed is in big galvanized range feeders outdoors, and we move the feeders each time we refill them. Any rats who take up residence in tunnels under the feeders have their tunnels exposed when the feeders are moved. Something — probably owls — takes care of the rest.

Only it's not working right now. Natural pest control is great when it works, but when it doesn't, now what? That's the problem with farming. You do the same thing over and over, but the results are different every time!

Well, whatever you believe about "live and let live," you have to draw the line at a rat population explosion. Their population can balloon really fast, and you can't have them overflowing from the pasture into the house! So it was time to take steps.

The simplest method of dealing with rats on a pasture occupied by hens (barring the use of a sniper rifle and a night-vision scope), is to use rat poison in tamper-proof bait stations. Now, I don't like using poison any more than you do, but this is a good example of Plamondon's Law: "The alternatives are even worse."

Bait stations are basically plastic boxes that creatures larger than a rat can't get into. On the better bait stations, the bait is secured one way or another to prevent the rats from carrying it off and possibly leaving it somewhere inappropriate. They have to eat it right there in the bait station, where any crumbs won't cause trouble.

(I also looked up the poison in question, and it's a lot more toxic to rats than it is to chickens, not that the chickens will get any exposure to it with the spiffy bait stations I use.)

I have some J. T. Eaton 903CL Rat Fortress bait stations, which I like very much. They have a clear lid so you can see if the bait needs to be replaced, which is a great feature. They're surprisingly hard to find. [Update: an Alert Reader found them at FarmTek.com — a good outfit that I've done business with many times.] Except for the clear lid, the Motomco rat bait station below seems to be equivalent.

I use the Tomcat brand bait blocks, which are weatherproof one-ounce cubes with a hole in the middle, so you can thread them onto a retaining wire that keeps the rats from walking off with them.

I put three bait stations on the pasture four nights ago, each next to a feeder. I didn't expect much activity, since the feeders were full, but I figured that when the feeders went empty, the rats would switch to the bait. The next morning, though, all the bait had been eaten! The rats preferred it to chicken feed and whole corn, apparently. The next night, almost all the bait had vanished again (one bait station was relatively unvisited). The next night, the same. Last night, some bait was left in all of the stations. [Update: The bait is no longer being eaten at all.]

I think this means that the rat population is starting to dwindle. In the past, I've used bait stations around the house, brooder houses, and barn, and the pattern was the same: initial interest in the bait, followed by lessened activity and a distinct absence of rodents that sometimes lasted as long as a year.

(By the way, if you are of the opinion that "rats are something that happen to other people," you will eventually be proven wrong. Sadly, they're likely to strike your brooder house first, and kill a lot of baby chicks. You don't want that! I recommend using bait stations or snap traps in your brooder house when it's not in use, or bait stations outside it all the time. Having your helpless baby chicks killed by rats is just too heartbreaking.)

You want to get the good bait stations. I just bought some cheap ones, and I regret it now. Too flimsy and insecure. I'm probably going to throw them away and buy some of the ones above.

By the way, there is now an organically certified rat poison. Is that weird, or what?

Sure, you want to buy baby chicks this year, but what if you only want pullet chicks? None of those nasty crowing roosters? If so, you're like a lot of people. Corvallis, for example, has an ordinance forbidding roosters in town, but hens are okay.

The problem is that the feed stores normally have straight-run chicks. That is, boys and girls together. What do do? Time's a'wasting, since the baby chicks will hit the stores in a couple of weeks.

Learning chick sexing is difficult and disgusting. See this video from Dirty Jobs if you don't believe me!

Well, that was fun, but what does it have to do with do-it-yourself chick sexing at the feed store? I'll tell you. The feed store will have at least one of these breeds for sale:

• Rhode Island Reds
• New Hampshire Reds
• Production Reds

All these breeds have something in common: The chicks with chipmunk stripes on their backs are females! Well, maybe not all, but at least 95%. And if you pick only the ones with well-defined chipmunk strips, it's more like 100%.

Most people don't know this, so the chicks aren't likely to have been picked over by other customers. Just make the clerk pick out the ones with the racy stripes because "they're pretty," and don't take no for an answer. Voila! Sexed chicks at straight-run prices!

(People have asked me, "What do you mean, 'chipmunk stripes'?" You'll know 'em when you see em. Most of the chicks won't have any stripes down their backs at all. On some, the stripes on their backs will be faint, and others, they'll be clear. Get the ones with the most clearly defined stripes.

And if you think that's clever, you ain't seen nothing yet. It's one of the least useful facts in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. Just by reading this book, you become a chick-rearing expert. Imagine how much more pleasure you'll get when you're completely successful every time.

I read hundreds of poultry books, extension bulletins, research papers, and magazine articles when researching this book, stretching from 100 years ago to the present day. I discovered many useful facts and techniques that have been forgotten, like the chipmunk-stripe trick. And it's all been reduced to 155 clear and straightforward pages. You will reap the rewards of my years of work in a couple of hours!

Buy the book before you get your chicks, so you know what to do, not what you should have done.

While this story about eggs and weight loss isn't new, it was news to me! Basically, one group of overweight people were given egg breakfasts and another bagel and cream cheese breakfasts with equal numbers of calories, and the egg-eaters ate less during the rest of the day, felt less hungry, lost more weight, and had more energy!

"Where can I sign up?" you ask. Well, you could do a lot worse than to throw out your cereal and bagels and eat a more traditional breakfast. Grass-fed eggs, for preference. The concept seems to be that protein satisfies your hunger longer, while carbohydrates set you up for renewed cravings a short time after eating.

The Atkins Diet, Grass-Fed Goodness, and Me

High-protein breakfasts (and lunches and dinners) have worked for me, too. I've lost 45 pounds [Update, March 5 -- Make that fifty pounds!] on the Atkins Diet, which I started a couple of years ago, and it certainly reduced my appetite. I enjoyed food as much as ever, but I ate less of it. Grass-fed eggs, pastured pork, and grass-fed chicken that we raise right here on the farm have been a big factor in my success. My only regret is that no one has bred a pig 50 feet long so it has enough bacon! We always run out of bacon first, and you just can't buy bacon like we get from our own pigs.

Another thing that helps me is to weigh myself every day and put a dot on a weight-loss chart. This give me daily feedback about my progress. If I start backsliding, I see it and start managing my eating more strictly.

I recommend a digital scale for this — they're very affordable these days, and they're a lot more accurate than the old spring-type models. It's best to buy tools you can trust!

The Most Important Thing is Not to Quit

Probably the most important thing is to make a firm decision that you're never, ever going to give up. You're going to keep working on weight loss, one way or another. Your tactics may change, but the goal will remain constant. If you fall off your diet, that's okay — it doesn't mean a thing. We all mess up sometimes, and that means that the occasional failure is normal, expected, meaningless. But you're going to get right back on the diet again.

You can switch diets, too, if you get stuck or get tired of the current one. You can do anything you want, except giving up!

How I Used Self-Hypnosis to Get Unstuck

I'm still not at my goal, and I've stalled a couple of times. I got stuck after losing 20 pounds, but used a self-hypnosis recording to get me unstuck and lose another 25 pounds. I was impressed!

I don't know what you think about hypnosis, but you can't argue with success, can you? Oh, wait, of course you can -- but you won't, because you're too considerate. Science has caught up with hypnosis over the past couple of decades, and it's lot less mysterious than it used to be. This is reflected in the format of self-hypnosis programs that you can buy on the Web. They tend to start with a calm discussion of the problem and its solution (say, weight loss), then walk you through some progressive relaxation to hopefully get you in a receptive state of mind, then they restate the solution again in a somewhat different way, often using anecdotes or metaphors in addition to making obvious suggestions like, "You're going to get slimmer because that's how you want to be."

I'm fond of the products from Hypnosis Downloads.com, which has a huge selection of downloads. Also, they're use less gimmickry than anybody. No echo chambers, no new-age music -- they're more straightforward and workmanlike than anybody else I've run into. Not to mention that their prices are reasonable and they have steep volume discounts if you buy more than one program.

I'm also talking a long walk every day and doing my farm chores, but I've done all those things for ages and they've never caused me to lose weight. The Atkins Diet and the self-hypnosis are what have worked for me. Two years so far, and no backsliding, though I'm still not where I want to be.

But eating eggs for breakfast is a good start!

Mother Earth News has picked up another of my blog postings to carry on their site: Brooding Chicks in Winter. I must say that I admire their taste!

Everyone knows that the brooding period is by far the most critical time of a chicken's life. And it's important that they do more than stay alive -- they have to thrive, or they'll have problems later in life.

Imagine how heartbreaking it is to not only have baby chicks die during the brooding period, but for the survivors to do poorly later on. Or, even worse, for children to have this experience. I wrote my book, Success With Baby Chicks, so that imagining this heartbreak is as close as you'll ever get. What you'll experience is success, with frisky chickens living the happy chicken life and all the good feelings and enjoyment that this will bring.

I do this in a clear, easy-to-follow, unpadded 150-page book. Major publishers think that consumers want bulk, and pad out their books with filler, but I respect your time and stick to the point -- ensuring your success and enjoyment. Because you're sitting at your computer right now and reading my chicken-oriented blog, you know that the book is a good match for you -- and you want to read it before you get your first chicks of the season, so you'll be ready.

You want it on your reference shelf, too. I reread the book from time to time myself, since I sometimes forget the fine points and need to refresh my memory.

And then that faint feeling of dread that some people feel when they order baby chicks -- will they be all right? -- will be replaced with well-founded confidence. Or so my fan mail claims. So order your copy today -- it can't help you until you read it.

These two videos document the "Chicken of the Future" contest from 1948, showing what, for the time, were the best chickens and the best practices for raising them (some of which most of us would envy, even today!)

They're worth watching just for the glimpses they give of good chicken-raising technique, but be careful to take a good hard look at the butchered carcasses! They look just like rubber chickens. And the chickens of 60 years ago grew more slowly, had higher mortality, and were less productive than modern hybrids.

This contest was very well run. Earlier egg-laying contests were easy to game, and the results of the contests had nothing in common with what you'd get if you bought baby chicks from the contestants. They were basically an accidental scam.

For the Chicken of the Future test, they started with a large number of hatching eggs -- too many to cherry-pick the ones from the best hens -- which were all incubated together. The day-old chicks were brooded in identical pens, then moved into different identical pens after the brooding period. When the cockerels were 12 weeks old, they were all butchered at the same time (with winning pens giving a dressed carcass weighing probably a little more than two pounds!) subjected to USDA inspection and grading, and generally compared with one another.

Feed consumption and overall profitability were kept track of. Profitability was affected by chick mortality, carcass value of the cockerels, rate of lay and size of eggs of the pullets, mortality among the pullets, and feed consumption. Careful records were kept. In the Forties, dual-purpose breeds like New Hampshire Reds usually won in total profitability -- so much so that no one seems to have bothered entering any White Leghorns!

Another interesting point was that the contest flocks had outbreaks of disease, which was considered routine at the time. Up until the Twenties, when small farm flocks were the rule, sickness in poultry flocks was uncommon, but it got worse and worse as flock sizes increased, reaching its peak in the Forties and Fifties, in spite of the introduction of antibiotics. Gradually, better biosecurity methods were introduces and the amount of disease plummeted. An outbreak of disease in a contest flock would not be considered routine today.

Karen has been after me to set up hen lights this year, after a hiatus of several years. Hens normally don't like to lay except when the day length is increasing or reasonably long or both, and neither holds true at the end of the year. Lights have been used since the 1880s to deal with this.

There's a lot of superstition about hen lights, ranging from the idea that it somehow uses up the hens, to the idea that hens are kept under brilliant 24-hour light as a form of torture.

Lights may have been hard on the hens in the 1880s, which was before anyone knew anything about nutrition, and flocks were generally malnourished during the winter. But the bright-light idea is just silly. Hens respond to very low levels of light, and electricity costs money. Light stimulation works at levels so dim that the hens can't see to move around. The real problem with traditional hen lights is that they're so dim that it's hard for the farmer to work by them. The hens have no difficulty sleeping with the lights on.

The main purpose of the lights is to shift some of the egg laying out of the spring and into the fall and winter. At best, it increases overall egg production by 15%, which is welcome but isn't really the point. The point is to get the kind of steady, year-round production that occurs naturally in the tropics, but not in regions as far north as I am. I'm at 45 degrees latitude, and daylight lasts only eight hours on Christmas week.

My lighting system is distinctly retro. Because I use portable pasture houses, the main feature of my lighting system is a thousand feet of outdoor extension cord going from house to house. I use a single 40-watt incandescent bulb per house. The whole thing is on a timer set to remain on from 6 AM to 8 PM, which is in series with a dusk-to-dawn sensor to turn the lights off when it's light out. This gives the hens 14 hours of light per day, which is the traditional amount to use. Traditionally, lights are used between September 1 and March 31. I'm off to a very late start.

I will post pictures later, after everything's up and running.

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!