We completed our new chicken coop! We are ready to move the hens to their coop this weekend! It’s a good thing, too, because they’re getting really big:
This one is a Light Brahma. They are the Brahmas that are growing the fastest. We also have Buff Brahmas and Dark Brahmas.
In order to finish the coop, we had to cut two windows. Our coop used to be a shed where gardening supplies were stored. In that capacity it didn't need ventilation. Now it does. My favorite window is the crazy trapezoidal window we cut in the door:
We used a terrifying power tool to cut the holes:
Then, we used a staple gun to stick a screen around the windows. Below you can see Jan trimming some of the excess after we'd stapled the screen into place. We got the screen out of an old door that was sitting in the garage. I’m telling you, farmers are the original Greens. They reuse everything!
Next, we added roosts at various heights around the coop. For this, we mounted a bunch of plant hangers upside down. We uncurled the loops that were supposed to hold the plants, until they were the right size to hold our long roosting poles.
Finally, we got all five roosts installed. And look! There’s storage that was hijacked from beneath an old waterbed! And you can see one of the nesting boxes to the right of the storage. I think the hens will like how it's all tucked in there.
I can’t wait to move the chickens! I think they’ll really like their new, swank digs. Also, they are pretty smelly, and I will be glad to get them off my front porch.
I will miss turning on the porch light in the morning, though. When I turn on their light, they all fly up into the air like popcorn popping. All of them, hopping into the air one after another, flapping their wings, and then alighting back on the floor. This goes on for a couple of minutes before they settle down.
Our chickens are just at the right age for flying. They have reached close to their adult wingspan, but they haven’t yet reached their adult body weight. As they age they will fly less and less well. Some breeds fly better than others. Bantams and Sablepoots reportedly fly the best. Leghorns are good flyers too. Brahmas do not fly well, so we don’t have to worry about them flying over the fence and going down the road to get into trouble.
Jan says that some people clip their chickens’ wings. But we don’t have great flyers, so we don’t need to.
Another thing that I worked on this week was destroying elm trees. The elm trees are invasive, and they like to ruin your home’s foundation and your septic system. We have a constant stream of new elms which spontaneously spring up on our farm. So, I’ve been working on lopping off shoots and small branches, and then painting the stumps with deterrent.
I was in the front yard doing that this morning when I heard a whirring sound in the pomegranate tree in the yard. I looked up, and a bird fluttered down to the ground. It continued saying “Prrrrrrr, Prrrrrr.” When it finally pulled its wings in I realized that it was a roadrunner! Honestly, I expected a roadrunner to say, “Meep, Meep!”
We have light rail in the Albuquerque area. Our light rail goes from Santa Fe (north of Albuquerque) to Belen (south of our farm). I love that train. It’s called the Rail Runner, and it's painted like a roadrunner (which, of course, is our state bird). Instead of having an announcement that says, “the doors are closing” the Rail Runner simply says, “Meep, Meep!”
So, you can see why I could think that an actual road runner might not whir like some kind of a dove! (Roadrunners are actually related to cuckoos. I thought that cuckoos would probably make a sound like a cuckoo clock. I was so wrong! They have several different calls, and one that is a kind of click-clacking that comes close to the roadrunners' call. I don't know why the clocks make the sound that they do. But, clock cuckoos have been making that sound since the mid-1600s.)
Anyway, the roadrunner in our front yard was so close to me that I could see his beautiful blue and red patch by his eye! This patch isn’t always visible in roadrunners. It appears in mating season, which is March through October.
I didn’t have my phone with me, so I wasn’t able to take a photo, so here’s a photo I got by searching for royalty-free shots online:
He looks exactly like the one in my front yard! And you can see the patch of colors by his eye.
I guess this week’s blog is all about birds! The final thing I wanted to talk about was our nest full of barn swallows. The parents have laid another clutch of eggs, and raised another group of babies! The second batch of babies have now left the nest, and in the morning, we see them all swooping around the yard in front of the hay barn, eating flies and mosquitos. They swoop a few feet above the ground, many of them all at once, churning in big circles. It’s amazing that no one crashes into anyone else.
Here are two of the most recent babies, hoping their parents will come soon and spit food into their mouths! (I am so glad I'm not a barn swallow!)
