As soon as they see me, it starts. The relentless pacing back and forth, the noisy complaints, all pressuring me to give in to their seemingly endless desire for just one thing.
My chickens live to free range.
Mind you, they have a very spacious coop, dry and draft-free in winter, along with a 100 square-foot run complete with a built-in jungle gym thanks to a few log poles at odd angles I’ve installed for their entertainment. These chickens have it made, but as with most sentient creatures, there’s always a desire for more. And while chickens may have a reputation as none too bright, I’ve spent enough time around my ten ladies to know better. They know what they want and they know how to get it.
If I’m out working in the yard or the garden, they never stop working me. “Come on, you’re right there, what’s the worst that could happen?” they seem to chide me, until I finally relent. I open the door to their run and they come charging out like a herd of buffalo, wings flapping in a mad dash to be the first one to the compost pile.
Chickens have been called feathered hogs and that’s probably fair since they seem willing to eat just about anything. And that’s part of the reason they spend more time in their run than they’d like.
We live in the middle of a very large forest that is home to predators of almost every kind, but other than losing a rooster two years ago to what I suspect was an owl, I’ve never had any issues with predators. It probably helps that I keep our dog Loki in the yard when the chickens are out. He’s good with the chickens and I figure that he’ll chase away any predator that comes around.
These days, I’m much less afraid of predators than I am of the damage that chickens can do, mostly to my garden, where I’ve already started some early planting in my raised beds. As I’ve learned the hard way, chickens can rip up a garden bed in minutes if left to their own devices, so you really can’t turn your back on them.
Somewhere, before I had chickens of my own, I had read a story suggesting that chickens were the perfect complement to gardeners everywhere as they would carefully glean through your garden plants, picking out the worms from the broccoli and cabbages and the slugs from the lettuce, while leaving your plants in near-perfect condition. It sounded idyllic and I imagined my chickens and I working the homestead together in near perfect harmony.
What bollocks! They’ll eat the cabbage worms all right and leave shredded or uprooted stalks of anything else that gets in their way. Give them half an hour and they’ll have the garden looking like a war zone.
I’ve learned to watch them closely when they’re out on a rampage, but sometimes even that isn’t enough. The other evening, I was planting some lettuce that had grown too big for the six-pack tray I’d started it in back in late March. The chickens had convinced me to let them out a half hour earlier and I was already beginning to regret it as I had to chase them out of one raised bed after another. Chickens love to dig for their supper (hog tendencies, again) and left alone they would quickly excavate all the dirt from my 11 raised beds into the nice wood-chip-lined paths that surround them. I knew if they found the freshly planted lettuce, they’d be all over it like piranha.
I chased them all well away to other parts of the yard when I had to step away for a moment. I have portable mini-hoophouses that I can move from bed-to-bed to provide extra protection in the very early season, and I had the structure already in place but needed a section of cloth row cover to put over it. I had stuffed the row covers from last year in a big bin in the garage so I walked quickly into the garage to grab one the right size.
It took a minute or so, but I figured the chickens were occupied elsewhere.
I was so wrong. I walked out of the garage to the sight of four chickens very excitedly devouring all my freshly planted lettuce. I yelled but they couldn’t have cared less. By the time I made it over there, I was steaming, ready to drop kick one of them, but they knew I was gunning for them and all darted away in different directions when I got within punting range. I surveyed the damage and it was total devastation, every plant save one was gnawed right to the ground.
I was mad, but I also knew it had been my own fault. Chickens aren’t going to be anything other than chickens, and I should have known better. I spent the next night running a chicken wire fence around my entire garden. I hope they take it personally.