Enter the Water Fowl

(Zholtee...Russian for Yellow... our new Embeden Goose at 2 days old. He/She should help protect my ducks from dogs and stray kids. I expect a tyrannical attack goose!)

 
(Ancona Duckling at two days old...love the spotted feet!)
 
Every year as the daylight comes back my farmer gene rears its evil head. It is a strange sickness but with the sun comes my need to acquire farm animals. It started with chickens and has escalated on and off from there. I have no idea why, but I just like owning animals I can eat when they become annoying. My dog is so lucky we have certain social stigmas in this country. I also think it is good for my kids to know where eggs and bacon come from.

We have had chickens for eight years. We live on a nice spot by Bethel standards and our back yard butts right up onto a shallow pond that is the first to thaw out each spring. There are no other houses on the back side of the lake so it makes for a nice view and I have been told over the years that I was missing out by not keeping ducks or geese.

This year as daylight started creeping back my farmer gene got the better of me. I discovered that I love, and I mean love, eating duck this last winter. It is fatty and juicy and at Kinley's in Anchorage they made it for me rare. It had the best crispy skin I have ever had AND it was rare. It defied the laws of physics and I am hooked. I decided to go for it. I ordered 8 ducks and 2 geese and decided I would go for it and see if they make a nice addition to our strange little homestead. Worst case scenario is that I just eat them all ... not a bad plan at all.

I have heard that geese can be really mean. I have kids so this gave me pause. Then I thought about all the stray dogs and stray kids that trample my garden and terrorize my chickens and decided a couple highly trained attack geese might not be a bad idea. I am pretty excited. I think they will protect my ducks and they will add to the lore of my yard. I aspire to be the crazy lady with the attack geese.

After much research I decided to go with:

Embeden Geese: very large and are actually not the most aggressive breed
Khaki Campbell Ducks: small but lay insane quantities of eggs if I can figure out how to winter them over
Rouen Ducks: a dual purpose breed good for either eggs or meat
Ancona Ducks: all purpose and mellow and stay close to home

The Geese will be huge and white with blue eyes. They are already obviously smart. It borders on creepy smart. The Khakis are small and frantic and run away from me constantly. The Rouens arrived with what looks like little bank robber mask markings and seem the most curious about people. The Anconas are spotted, even on their feet and are, in my opinion the cutest of the bunch.

I am more excited about this new adventure than I thought I would be. I especially like their creepy duck feet. I never realized they had toenails. So far they all have way more personality than a chicken and they are outdoor tough at two weeks. I like tough.

The Chicken Chronicles -- Feed and Assundries

(Picture is the tote of oyster shells my chickens have decided is the new hot nesting area....we find a couple eggs in here each day and a few in the back corner of the coop. No idea how part of an egg carton got in there...must be the work of my little helpers)

I have read many articles about proper nutrition and protein ratios for chickens. In my experience I give them unmedicated chicken pellets, chicken scratch and whatever else I have laying around. It may negatively effect my production...but I really don't care. I get almost an egg a day from each hen in summer because of our daylight. Early on I was hyper about what and how I fed them, but they are messy and wasteful and crap in their own food dishes.

For 8 chickens I will usually give them about 25 lbs of feed a month, maybe a little less depending on what kind of scraps I can score. Chicken scratch is their favorite because it is like candy for chickens. It does not have the same nutrient value as the pellets. I usually have one bag open at a time so they get pellets or scratch and then change it up.

The last couple years we have just started cutting open a bag and leaving it on the floor in the entry away from the door. They just help themselves. I know it sounds crazy (and lazy), but it really is a better method. When I used feeders I found that they stick their head in and flick 75% of the food onto the ground and then never go back and eat it because they are nasty stinkers. When the bag is on the floor like that they can't waist as much. I leave it in the bag because the bag keeps them from pooping all over the food. They stick their heads in the slit (about 18 inches long) while standing on the edge of the bag. The bag stays in the coop to keep it dry.

Scraps are the joy of owning chickens. I tell people I turn all my leftovers into eggs. They will eat pretty much anything...including chicken (everyone asks and that is your answer). I have found they do not care much for citrus peels, onion skin, avocado peel, uncooked root vegetables, or the very tough outside of watermelon rind. I put it all out there anyway because it composts into the chicken yard and I use that on my garden. When the salmon are running they will eat raw fish scraps a couple times but then ignore them...which leads to maggots which they are crazy over (gross but true) . Cooked fish they will eat all day, but I am not cooking salmon scraps for the chickens. They especially love leafy veggies, grass, and junk food (french fries, chips, fried things). Anything that spoils in the fridge goes straight to the chicken yard. Grass clippings...chicken yard. Gardening scraps and trimmings...chicken yard.

A friendly warning is that they will eat all your grass if you do not keep them contained. There is a chicken neck length perimeter around my fence that is barren. There is nothing growing in the chicken yard. They love grass and greens. If you have a small yard and let them run free they will pick it clean.

The only things that should not be fed to chickens are the nightshade plants (potato, tomato & eggplant plants...the fruits are fine), rhubarb leaves, and really moldy food. Mold apparently messes up their gizzards and the others are poisonous.

I have a couple water buckets that I keep full in summer. They perch on the edge and tip them over all the time...because they are dumb. In winter they drink snow since the water freezes too fast.

If my chicken yard was not already kind of ripe (A week of rain and I seriously consider just eating all of them and ending the poo production) and 8 feet from my living room window I would "raise" more maggots. When we had pigs (I'll write about that adventure another day) we would scoop up maggots for the chickens and they would go absolutely crazy with joy eating them up. Maggots are free and nutritious and keep food costs down. And yes...we are that kind of crazy at our house. Someday my kids are going to realize how wacky we are and I am going to laugh myself silly.

Beyond food, chickens also need grit and some kind of calcium source for egg shells. I bought one bag of each 8 years ago and that was it. I feed egg shells back to the chickens and I throw some oyster shell onto the ground every couple months. I have never had a mis-formed shell. I had a bag of grit. I would sprinkle it out in the yard every once in a while. I could not find it last summer. Chickens don't have teeth, they have a gizzard. The gizzard is full of little rocks (grit) that grinds up what they eat. If they don't have a natural source you have to provide the grit so they can digest their food. I have not done grit in over a year and all my birds are right as rain. Maybe they are getting what they need off the ground?? I will get another bag at some point but at present I am not overly motivated since they are fine and it is expensive to mail rocks out here.

I usually get feed and sundries from Span Alaska shipped in by Barge. There are 2 barges each year so I just plan accordingly. When I run low on feed I order on line from Alaska Mill & Feed but it is much more expensive because of all the "shipping and handling mark-ups". By barge I can also get a 100 lb bale of hay and that will easily last all year and they will get farm supplies not in the catalog if you ask them.

I pretty much dial it in and do just fine with my Chickens. They are only really labor intensive if you want to make them that way.