As we’re now well into another winter as chicken keepers, I thought I’d write about any difference between keeping chickens in winter to other seasons.

Well the first big difference is the mud / wet due to the rain or snow in the chicken run. Obvious I suppose, but the chicken run quickly can turn into a quagmire in the winter.

It’s also quite ‘interesting’ having to walk down the end of the garden on a dark cold winter’s morning to let the chickens out… But as soon as you get close to the chicken coop, the reward of their ‘tap-tapping’ beaks on the door, eager to be let out to ’see you’ is usually ‘reward’ enough!

When the chicken run floors get really muddy we usually try to move the birds into a communal indoor shed where they can enjoy clean dry conditions in relative comfort.n dry days i allow them access outside all day long and lock them up again safely at night.

In the past we have used bark mulch on the chicken run floors with a reasonable level of success. In my experience it needs to be put down about 4 inches deep to be effective.

Also due to the ‘cold’, it’s important to make sure that when keeping chickens in winter, that they have access to water. A few times already it’s got cold enough to freeze their water, so make sure the chickens can ‘get at’ the water under the ice layer!

There’s also the decreased egg production due to the seasons to think about. Late summer and autumn, we got three eggs per day from our chickens on most days – this is now down to 2 or 3 if we’re lucky. I’ve read conflicting reports on the internet on whether to ‘light’ the chicken house to improve egg production.

It would appear that if we add lighting to our chicken house, then we could probably get the chickens back on to three eggs per day – as they’d be fooled into thinking it was summer time. I’ve also read of people adding pepper to their chicken’s feed. This is supposed to give them a ‘warm feeling inside’, like it does with us, again to trick them into thinking it’s not winter!

There’s a reason why battery farmed chickens are culled after a year or so, they’re fooled into thinking it’s summer all year round by artificial lighting and are basically egg laying ‘machines’ – and reduce their effective egg producing limits due to this.

Our chickens are not battery chickens, so I think we’ll leave them to sort it out themselves. I think I’d prefer to stay on the ‘natural’ side and allow the chickens to adapt to the seasons. If this means egg production is reduced during the winter then so be it.

So the chickens are going to bed earlier as it gets dark earlier in the day; and staying in bed longer! Doesn’t sound like a bad life I suppose. Of course as they’re spending more time in their chicken house, there’s also a increased need to clean them out… More time the chickens spend in the chicken house, the more chicken poo that is left in their for you to add to the compost heap.

It’s the ying and yang of keeping chickens in the winter I suppose; more cleaning to do, but more chicken poo to add to the compost that will eventually get dug into the garden vegetable plots.

There’s also the consideration when keeping chickens in winter, of whether to add some heat to the chicken house. This could be done with adding lighting – by product of adding a light would be some additional heat.

I suppose this consideration is more worthy of action if we get a winter anything like the winter we had to suffer last season.

We’ve just made sure that we’ve added lots of extra insulating bedding material to the chicken house, but I suppose the house could be insulated with cardboard or similar if it got really cold. Chickens are originally ‘wild’ birds, so the only thing that really worries me about them in the winter is them standing in the rain and ‘catching colds’… Feathers don’t seem to do too well in the wet!

Of course if you’re insulating the house, makesure there’s ample ventalation. Chickens can really ‘work up a fog’; they sweat through their beaks, so there will be additional condensation created by the chickens in their house and a more ‘wetter’ chicken house will result if it’s badly insulated.

We’ve also been ’spoiling’ our chickens with extra chicken food and kitchen titbits, we’ve got our neighbours and  family members to join us and save up their ‘green’ kitchen waste and stale bread.

We’ve then been feeding this ‘free’ chicken food to the chickens, on top of their layers pellets and corn staple diet. Our chickens are also free to roam round our garden for most of the day light hours – as long as someone’s in, so they also add whatever they find in their garden worth eating to their diet themselves…

We usually feed toasted rolled wheat to all our flock in the late afternoon each day. The wheat fills the birds up and helps keep the birds warm throughout the cold nights.

They’re particurlary interested in scratching around the leaf pile and pile of windfall apples that I’ve left by the compost bins. It’s on my ‘to do’ list to add this to the compost, but it’s been laying here since the late autumn and I think there’s a really big micro community of bugs living in it now. I say bugs, the chickens say gourmet feast!

So we’d built up quite a pile of own and ‘donated’ vegetable peelings, bread and other odds and sods and decided to have a go at making our own chicken mash.

Basically we kept the water from the boiled vegetables after a sunday roast and used this as a ’stock’. We then got the largest pan we had and filled it with our assorted bread and vegetable goodies, added a couple of handfuls of corn and layers pellets, poured on the water, put it on a low heat, stirred and simmered for a few hours.

The result was a chicken mash that looked a bit like the consistency of ’soggy’ bread pudding. (I think the dog was a bit jealous that we’ve been cooking for the chickens and not him!) The chicken feed mash smelt ok – foodie, I suppose due to it containing waste human food!

Proof of the (bread) pudding is in the eating, so we took a plateful of homemade chicken mash up to the chickens and awaited their decision. It appears that the chicken mash got the seal of approval, as they ate it all within minutes.

We now plan to make up a chicken mash once per week – make up enough to give them a treat in the morning of chicken mash and continue with their normal chicken feed. The good thing about making your own chicken mash is that it’s chicken food for free. It would have otherwise have gone in the bin, or on the compost, so this way it’s being used and still eventually going on the compost

I’ll add some more soon.

On a recent Sunday morning, a local friend invited people over to learn how to properly kill and butcher chickens. He raises broilers every summer in her urban backyard, feeding them organic food and letting them free-range under the blue sky. These guys fill her freezer and provide her with meat for the year. Although I have killed a couple chickens before, I was curious to see the “proper” way to do it.

Broilers have been breed over the years to be rather dumb and gain weight incredibly quickly. By the time they are only 8-12 weeks old, they need to be butchered lest they eat themselves so fat that they can’t walk or have a heart attack. The chickens we butchered were actually roosters, but the meat from broilers tastes the same really. This is not the case for egg-layers, whose roosters taste tough and lean.

When you catch a chicken, it is important to make sure your hands are covering their wings to prevent them from flapping out of your hands. Once caught, hold them snugly to your body. I think most animals get a calm feeling when they are held snugly. Perhaps it’s the heart beat they hear or maybe it’s just comforting for other reasons. I ended up doing a lot of the killing because I was pretty good at the catching without causing the birds to really freak out.

The birds are held by their feet, then gently turned upside down. Chickens get disoriented when they are upside down and after a few seconds they become very calm, their wings kind of relax out. After they become disoriented, we slid them down into a small construction cone with the top cut off and a bucket down below.

One person held their feet at the top and the other person (often me) took a knife and slit their throat. I covered their face when I did it, to continue to keep them as unaware of things as possible. They bleed to death from there, which I am told is one of the most humane ways to die – the blood rushes out of your body as you pass out. There is usually some twitching at this point, even though the bird is dead quite quickly, as the body shuts down and nerves react. The blood streams down into the bucket below the cone.

Once the bird is done bleeding, the head comes off and they are plunged into a very large pot of water that is about 140 degrees in temperature. The bird is submerged for about ten seconds, which loosens the feathers without cooking the bird. The bird is then defeathered, starting with the wings and tail feathers which are the hardest to remove. The other feathers should come out pretty easily by just wiping them off. If they are not coming out easily, the bird needs to go back in the water for a few more seconds.

There was a separate station for working on the inside of the bird. It is good to keep these as two separate areas to ensure everything stays clean.

With the chicken on its back and using a sharp knife, cut down the neck until you find two tubes. One will resemble a vacuum cleaner hose, which is the esophagus. Cut this off as far down as you can and discard. The second tube will be the one leading to the crop.

My friend didn’t feed the birds the day before, which meant cleaning the crop would be less messy. Follow the crop tube down until you find the attached bag, which is the crop (pictured below). Pull this out as far as possible, cut and discard.

Turn the bird around, still on its back, and begin the cleaning. Start by cutting a “Y”, which means a straight line from the bottom of the breast bone, about two inches. Then cut to either side at a diagonal down to either side of the tail. Make sure you only cut deep enough to pierce the skin. The intestines are right under your knife and you really, really want to avoid cutting those open.

With your knife angled almost straight down, cut a horizontal slit right below the anus along the tail, connecting to the two end points of your “Y”. In the picture below, the person was holding the knife to demonstrate where we would be cutting.

You have now cut straight down a few inches, along either side of the body cavity, and then along the underside of the anus. You should be able to now gently pull the anus out, which will also pull the intestines and such out.

Once you have some guts pulled out, put your hand inside the bird. Using the side of your hand like a spatula, move along in internal body cavity to loosen any guts from the walls. This should help you gently pull everything out. Be very gentle with the galbladder, which will be an almost black organ with a texture similar to the intestines. This is the absolute worst thing to puncture, as it holds all the bile and super gross stuff.

You may choose to keep the heart and liver as you clean the bird. Plunge those into cold water if that is the case.

Once cleaned, the bird needs to be rinsed with a hose and plunged into ice cold water for it to cool quickly.

On average, the eight week old roosters weighed around 5 1/2-6 pounds. My friend was sweet enough to send me home with a bird to eat and chicken feet for our dogs to enjoy. The feet are also good when making chicken stock, but unfortunately we just don’t have the freezer room right now.

Maybe it’s because I have killed a couple chickens before, or maybe because I am really aware already that something died to become my dinner, but I didn’t leave feeling sad or disturbed. These birds are breed for one purpose: meat. And I feel like the ones I handled were pretty calm and died very quickly. It makes me happy to know they saw sunshine and ate worms in the green grass before their time was up – something most chickens that end up as dinner never experience.

I know not everyone will agree, and I hope that means they are vegetarian! It is a process I think every meat-eater should experience at some point in their lives. In the end, it makes us more grateful when we sit down to enjoy a beautiful roast chicken for dinner

Whilst dismantling some of the perches, I found the dreaded Red Mite so have waged war against them with Poultry Shield.

Red Mite multiply rapidly during warm weather and they are on the rise in backyard flocks. Red Mite never used to be a problem in days gone by because most chicken coops were traditionally coated in Creosote to protect them against the weather but it also had the effect of eradicating the mites as well. Creosote substitute was introduced a few years back and unfortunately this doesn’t provide any protection against the dreaded mites.

I was introduced to Poultry Shield about 4 years ago. It is one of the safer it is probably one of the best known products on the market, and has been really well tested by many fanciers

How does Poultry Shield Work?

Red Mites have a waxy coating on their bodies. Poultry Shield effectively dissolves this and over 24 to 48 hours, the mites dry up and die.

Poultry Shield is diluted down at a rate of 20 parts water to 1 part Poultry Shield for cleaning and protection but it is recommended to be used at twice the strength (10:1) when you are trying to eradicate a red mite infestation like this. Poultry Shield is available from various sources but as a cleaner and Red Mite treatment, this should last a year or two for the average small flock.

Let the Red Mite battle begin!

So I have started battle with the Red Mite. I have washed down the house with Poultry Shield, inside and out and in every possible nook and cranny. I have concentrated my efforts around the perch ends where I could see clumps of mites and an hour later, I have hosed the house down before replacing bedding and shavings in the nest boxes. I will rub diatom onto the perches tonight to catch any remaining mites that fancy a free lunch and will re-inspect (and probably re-wash) the house out again next weekend.

At Old Mc Donalds we have seen a huge increase in the number of customers calling us with serious red mite problems with their poultry and chickens.Here is some practical advice on eradicating red mites .

What are Red Mites? They are not the same as the garden Red Spider mite, but a blood sucking pest by the name of DERMANYSSUS GALLINAE. They are not always red, young ones or hungry mites are pale, the red comes from the blood they suck from the poor birds.

Red mites are not usually found on the birds, they hide in the housing in daylight emerging at night to jump onto the birds to feed. Normal chicken lice are a orangey colour and feed off feather and skin debris, they itch and look unsightly but are not a huge risk. Red Mite can be a killer, birds become listless, poor feeders and fade away. Warning signs are pale combs and wattles, decreased appetite, no eggs, unwillingness to go into the house at night and apathy. In the chicken house you may notice a ‘musty’ smell , small bugs that swarm all over you and make you itch, a white dust in crevices and around doors in the house, obvious waxy clumps of red matter and if you go out with a torch at night you may see the mites crawling over the birds and woodwork.

What to do? Thorough cleaning of the house and surroundings is essential. Clean out thoroughly and dismantle if possible to expose hidden surfaces. Remove roofing felt or any insulation as the mites hide under it, consider replacing roof with Onduline if practical. The house can then be washed or sprayed with a Red Mite treatment, Poultry Shield is excellent. The powder treatments containing silica or Diatoms such as Barrier Organig Red Mite Powder or Net Tex Red  Mite powder are also effective, the effect is not immediate so dont give up, it acts by abrading the shell and desiccating the little whatsits, and is safe for use on bird.

Ardap is an excellent spot treatment for red mite tratment, and can be used immediately.I use it for hot spots after the poultry shield, Vulcan powder also helps in the house, both are not recommended for on bird treatment.

A lot of products around are only deterrents, so read labels carefully before using. If a proper treatment is not  available, even garden disisnfectant will help. Steam cleaners and heat guns will also help, but must be used with care and appropriate electrical safety guidlines followed. The life cycle of the Red Mite is 7-10 days, and they can live without feeding for 36 weeks, so constant vigilence is required. If buying a used house always treat before use.

Some houses are impossible to get free of the pest, solution? Burn them and buy a new one! It is also important to either move the house or treat the surrounding area, as the mites can just move straight back in. I have caught a lot by putting sticky fly papers in empty houses, and also by putting rolled up cardboard in the roof space. The cardboard can be removed and burnt, they seem to love hiding in it.

PREVENTION. Regular cleaning and treatment and use of deterrent. One of my customers has 2 houses, one for summer and one for winter. When he moves the birds he uses the old illegal creosote (not recommended now for animal housing) to treat the empty house. This gives the empty house 6 months to ventilate, he has no red mites problem, thsi may be due to the creosote or just good husbandry but it does seem that red mite has increased since proper creosote was banned.

Bathing your birds also seems beneficial. A tub of warm water with an animal Tea tree oil shampoo in, and then a rinsing tub of clean warm water with a few drops of Tea tree oil works for my Orpingtons. Choose a warm day and have lots of help, they look pathetic afterwards but soon fluff up.

The shortlist of suitable treatment products is as follows

I hope this guide is of some help, if you are still concerned about your birds health then consult a veterinary surgeon, some of the symptoms of Red mite can be similar to other diseases.

The R Com range of incubators is definetly the most specialist incubators and brooders on the market today.

The basic R Com mini 3 egg incubator is ideal for those starting out with incubation and for schools etc.

The R Com Suro is undoubtedly the best small incubator in its class.

The King Suro are in my opinion is like the Brinsea Octagon 20 Advanced EX models that sell at �297.93, the Suro has all the features including an automatic humidity system and matches the Brinsea model very well, in fact in my opinion hatch rates a bit better and they are the easiest incubator I have ever had the good fortune to CLEAN, wow they are super easy on cleaning and oh yes we are selling at �110 less than their Brinsea rival!!!

We have been working with R-COM incubators for many months now, with very interesting changes and improvements to this final attractive final model. Overall the development has been very exciting on this unit with very impressive results so far. Believe it or not the bigest issues have been on the original design being described as an ‘eloectric oven’ – despite great results it was upgraded to a better design.

For cleaning the incubator it easily dissasmbled, in fact the design is such that it is one of the easiest incubators to clean on the market today.

Standard R COM 20 Incubator

• Automatic temperature setting
  and control
• Automatic humidity setting and control
• Automatic hourly egg turning
• Large double-glazed observation window
• Easy dismantling for cleaning
• Selection of �C or� F for temperature display

• Alarm to warn if the observation window is not secured
• Automatic fan cutout when incubator is disassembled
• �Low Water� alarm
• Incubation settings are automatically saved in the event of power failure

A wonderful economical egg incubator, giving amazing features for the price.

The RCOM Maru 380 cabinet incubator.

A new fully automatic RCom incubator with capacity for 380 eggs, and like all RCOM Incubators it has one touch controls and full humidity control built in.

Functions MARU-380 MARU-1000 Model No CT-380 CT-1000 Capacities (Chick Egg Size) 380 950 Egg Turning Method Cradle Cradle Egg Turning Angle (Degree) 0,70 0,70 Egg Turning Interval (Min) 0,60,120,180 0,60,120,180 Turning Motor 1 EA 2 EA Control Method (Indication Device) FND FND Humidification Device O O Option Egg Basket, Divider Egg Basket, Divider Number of Trays 3 Floors 4 Floors, Multi-Aligned Dimensions (W x H x L) 440 x 838 x 823 816 x 963 x 823 Weight 29 53 Consumption (W) 100 150

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