A few people contacted me with additional suggestions, you can also try:

• Craigslist to see if any are available
• Freecyle to make a request or see if any are posted

One lucky reader even told me how she had found a wire cage on the side of the road set out for free and grabbed it. She said that she’s used it a million times for many different things.

My point is, you don’t need an expensive new one, you simply need to get one (and if it’s free, all the better.)

One of my readers (Stephan-not-Stephen-who-is-really-Modesty) sent me this photo that he found on Craiglist:

It gets me all kinds of excited. Not only does it suggest a cost effective way to make a cage (some chicken wire, a staple gun, and Grandma’s outdated side table is all you need) but, if you leave the bottom open, it’s also a neat way to make a “mini-chicken tractor” which are those portable cages you move around your yard so your chickens can feed in a different area each day. (And Modesty take note: it’s hawk proof.)

Wanting to walk the talk, I put up on my facebook page that I was looking for wire dog crates. Because I teach chicken workshops and want people in my community to have chickens, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have a few in storage should someone contact me with an immediate need.

One of my friends who knows that I tend to collect (I just want to always be prepared) some things, checked in with me after she had read my post.

“You’re not going to start hoarding dog crates now, are you?”

Even typing that last sentence makes me giggle. What kind of sick person does my friend think I am to hoard dog crates????

And besides, why on earth would I start hoarding dog crates, when I can collect these little beauties?

My first class; Chickens 101 is all about how to get chickens (chicks and adults) and how to take care of them until they are old enough to go outside and live on their own in a henhouse.

Chickens 102 is about, now that you have adult chickens, how to you keep them alive and healthy. We cover egg health, injuries, and basic first aid for chickens. I’ll be covering all of these topics in future posts but I wanted to put this one out there first.

For your flock, one of the most important pieces of equipment that you can get is a medium to large size wire dog crate. (Start looking for them when yard-sale season begins.) There are a few reasons why I consider this to be an essential item for every chicken owner:

Isolation – when you bring a new bird home to your flock, good biosecurity measures dictate that you isolate the bird from the rest of your flock for at least a week. One sick bird can wipe out your entire flock. Unless you want to keep the bird in your garage (and I do know of a family that did that) you’ll want to keep the bird in a confined, ventilated area where they have access to food and water. A dog crate is the perfect size for a few adult birds (and if you remove the bottom tray, you can put it right on your lawn and your chickens will eat the grass, bugs, and fertilize your lawn all at the same time!)

Chicken ICU – if you have a sick or injured bird, chances are you will have to isolate it so that the other birds don’t peck at it (they’re not being mean, it’s instinctual, the weaker birds are eliminated for the good of the flock.) Over the years we’ve had to isolate chicks from adults, pecked birds from the rest of the flock, and birds with foot injuries so that they can have access to food and water. It gives stressed and injured birds a chance to get the food and water they need to heal. Also by isolating a sick bird immediately, you have a chance of keeping your entire flock from getting infected.

Nursery safe area – when we put our baby chicks in with the adults last summer, they were heavily pecked. It’s all part of establishing the proverbial pecking order but when we saw that some of the pecking was drawing blood on the babies, we dismantled the dog cage and used the sides to create a safe area in the hen house with an opening that was low enough for the chicks to go under but not the adult birds. In there we placed food and water. As the chicks got older and braver, they ventured out more and more but when frightened or chased they always went back to the “safe house.” We took three sides of the crate, wired them together and set it back against a corner.

Ventilated top – when you have baby chicks, you can put them in a Tupperware container but you’ll need to have a ventilated top to let the moisture that comes from the water, waste, and even the chicks’ breathing, escape (otherwise you’re going to get sick chicks and tons of mold.) The best lids, we’ve found are the sides from the dog crates. They are lightweight and yet keep those babies right where they should be.

If you don’t have a wire dog cage (you can use those hard shell ones but they are not as versatile) be on the lookout for one starting today (put it on your facebook page that you are looking for one, you’d be surprised how many people have them stored in their basements or garages.) It’s best to be prepared, you don’t want to be in a position where you need to immediately isolate your bird and have nowhere to put her.

photo credit: AlishaV

This is my son during warm ups (the one in the white pants in the center – click on the photo to get the full effect.)  Now is the time for me to puff up my feathers and tell you how proud I am of this kid.

He has been doing gymnastics since he was 5 years old. The only one of my kids who was a climber, (the other kids would climb on the monkey bars, Trevor would always be the kid on top of the monkey bars) I figured that if he was going to climb then he was going to have to learn how to fall. I enrolled him in a gymnastics class and within a few weeks, he was put on the boys’ team.

As a high school junior he spends 24 hours in the gym. Every week. It’s an incredible commitment. Because gymnastic meets can sometimes be far away, it means there is a lot of travel time which means there is a lot of time to talk. During the drive to West Point, we laughed, we told stories, he told me what he hated most about my generation, and I told him what I hated most about his. We ate Reuben sandwiches at Reins Deli in Connecticut and ended up having a great time.

Prior to leaving for the meet he had sent letters of interest to the Navy and Army gymnastics coaches. My little chick is interested in joining the military and in going to one of the academies.

As I watched him talk to the coaches (moms are supposed to stay behind the scenes) I saw my son stand tall, shake hands with the men, and look them in the eye when talking to them. What I saw was a young man getting ready to leave our nest.

I have mixed feeling about that.

Here’s what scares me about the military, sometimes, they seem like a bunch of brutes who think that might is the only way. They push, they intimidate. With a few, it seems like they like to fight just a little too much.  I know not everyone behaves that way, but more than one is too many in my book.

My son is not like that. He’s intelligent and thoughtful. He’ll protect an animal that is hurt, a child that is being bullied. My son is a critical thinker. We’ve worked hard at making sure he knows right from wrong, good from bad, and ignorance and intolerance from well, simply knowing better than that.

And it is for those very reasons (and the fact that it’s nearing the time for him to start living his life the way he wants to), I am supporting my son’s decision to go into the military. Trevor is the kind of kid that would be an asset, he’d lead by example, and frown upon abuse. He’d have a lot to add.

In short the military would be lucky to have my little chick in their corner.

Here is Charlie on the day we got her home. (note – little black chicks are notoriously difficult to take photos of.)

just a little bitty thing.

And here is Charlie now, almost 2 weeks later.

This chick has legs from here to there.

Here are her feet before I released the webbing.

You can see the webbing and deformation in this photo.

And here they are 4 days after the surgery. As you can see there is still a lot of extra tissue (that Charlie sometimes tugs at) but she is able to roost, walk upright using both feet equally, scratch, and roost. All very important chicken activities.

It does look like she has a small amount of feather growth on her feet which may or may not cause a problem because of the extra tissue and her middle toes are still a tiny bit curled but I don’t think it’s enough to justify a shoe (where the heck are the toenails on those toes?)  But as far as healing is concerned, Charlie is ready to be discharged from the chick ICU and is now back to her regular antics while hanging out with the rest of the human flock.

But first I want to talk about some of the pitfalls of owning chickens.

The Northeastern Poultry Congress was all about fowl. It was about selling birds and judging them. No admission was charged.

So when you go to one of these things, the considerate thing to do is to at least buy tickets to the Chinese lottery (you buy 20 tickets for 5 dollars and drop your tickets into the bags hanging in front of the items you’d like to win.) It’s a way for them to raise money. You win, they win, we all win.

We have a very winning family. So much so, that my kids are actually disappointed when we don’t win something, not because we didn’t get the item but because we didn’t WIN. (Hey once, we even won 2114 jelly beans.)

One of our strategies during lotteries like this is to drop tickets into the bags with the fewest tickets. You get a better chance of winning, right? (I justify this by claiming it’s a lesson in probabilities for my kids.) It doesn’t matter what the object is, we say, it’s the odds that we are playing.

At 3:00 when they started calling out the results of the lottery, who was the first person to win something?

Me.

This is what I won.

Marc kept the mug.

I think I had the only ticket in the bag. People were actually laughing at me when I tried to pick up all that stuff (I had to make two trips to the car.) I got cookie tins (empty), a strange snowman in a flower pot, silk flowers, ornaments, and a really scary looking leprechaun, partially stuffed into a Victoria’s Secrets bag (which my 4 teen sons all called dibs on.)

Oh well, it’s the thought that counts, right? And anyway, Savers was on the way home. I’m still a winner.

I didn’t expect much for the rest of the auction (I mean what are the odds?) but low and behold, my name was called again, and this is what I won the second time.

Trust me, if you like chickens, you’ll recognize this one as the gold mine that it is. Someone obviously cleared off their shelves of chicken figurines and now I get to have them. There are little chickens, old chickens, matching chickens, white chickens, and even a little green glass chicken-like thing. Marc sighed as I happily started placing chickens all around our house.

Ain’t no way, these babies are making their way to Savers. Perhaps though, after a year of sitting on our shelves, I’ll gather them together and just might donate them back to the show so that some other lucky person can win them in next year’s lottery.

If you recall before I started, her toes looked like this:

You can see the webbing and deformation in this photo.

Charlie is a sweet chick but those feet were probably not going to hold up the weight of a full grown chicken which is why I decided to try and release the toes.

Charlie is doing well, the wounds have closed and she is walking around. Last night we introduced a stick as a roosting post hoping that the use of it would get her to start moving her toes (chicken physical therapy) but she prefers the edge of the cardboard box which she came home in and which is still in her cage.

That wooden candy cane was too slippery to be used for roosting.

But here’s the good news.

This is her right foot.

And this is that one that was horribly deformed.

Her left foot is still curled, especially that middle toe,  (some of that is extra tissue from the webbing) and we may be putting a shoe on it in the next few days but compared to what it was, this is nothing short of amazing. Granted Charlie is not going to win any pretty toe contests in the next few weeks but it does look like she’s going to win her adulthood.

And that’s just fine with me.

If you are readers of this blog, you know that last weekend I was given a tiny Maran chick that was unable to be sold because both of her feet were webbed and one foot was deformed. Webbed feet (toes that are fused together) is a genetic condition making this little guy unsuitable for any kind of breeding, the future didn’t look good for her (for the record we still don’t know if it is male or female but to quote Trevor “If Charlie turns out to be a boy, I’m just gonna cry.”)

After convincing (read – pleading) with the seller to let me buy the chick by letting her know that we raise our chickens as pets and only for eggs, and that we seem to specialize in “special” ones, she let me have him. Marans lay dark chocolate colored eggs, hence her name “Charlie” – as in “and the Chocolate Factory.”

A chick in the winter in New Hampshire is not the best of all times to have one. She won’t be ready until around the Spring to go outside which means for all intents and purposes we have an indoor chicken. (Yeah, says Marc.)

Our house is very cold and so in order to keep Charlie warm we heat up the TV room with an electric heater making it toasty warm. So toasty, in fact, that the other kids are pretty much living there also. (Seriously, our house, which used to be a summer cottage by a water fall, is so poorly insulated that you can see curtains blowing in the breeze. In the winter, wool and polar fleece become our best friends.)

This of course means that Charlie is getting very socialized. Chickens are flock birds, when I teach people about chickens, I always say that you have to have at least 3 birds in your flock. Not having other chicks right now, the kids have become Charlie’s flock. She shits (that was actually a typo but I think for obvious reasons I’m going to keep it in) sits on their shoulders while they watch TV and she likes to cuddle up near a warm neck or under an armpit.

Everyone loves Charlie.

Except that Charlie had those horrible feet that were literally hobbling her. When we moved her to a large plastic tub, because she walked on the knuckles of one foot, it started bleeding. Not good. I had to make a decision, leave it alone and hope that maybe she could build up enough scar tissue to walk on her feet, or try to release the toes.

I wasn’t sure that those feet would be able to tolerate the weight of a full grown chicken.

After one week of adjusting, I decided it was time to do a little bit of surgical intervention. Based on instructions that were pointed to me by a good friend (who, is now Charlie’s official God-mother, thanks Lauren!) we decided to go for it. We thought about doing only one foot at a time but decided instead to do them both at once (based on reading others’ accounts that said their chicks bounced back by the end of the day.) These are the steps we took:

Charlie wasn't too keen on her bath.

1.Wash the feet off of gunked-on food and poop.

You can see the webbing and deformation in this photo.

2.Sterilize some cuticle (curved, thin, and sharp) scissors in Isopropyl (Rubbing) alcohol (use good quality scissors, the first set I found the blades actually bent if pressure was applied – not good for tiny toes, I bought a top-brand pair for about 11 dollars)

3.Put a large glop of instant Oral-gel onto each foot and hold the chick quiet for a few minutes.

4.Bath the foot in Betadine (do this over newspaper or you’ll have stained memories of this in your house for the rest of your life)

Right foot.

Left foot, the tricky one.

5.Apologize to the baby, tell her that it might hurt but it will be better in the long run and while someone else (Trevor) firmly holds the chick, spread out one foot and as best you can snip the webbing up to the main foot. Do it as quickly as you can with precision. A longer cut is better than a lot of little snips. The chick will squawk a bit, either in distress or pain but it’s not that bad. (Not like your kid getting her first shots.) For this step, really spread the toes wide, you want to snip the webbing and not the cut the actual toe.

6.In our case, I also had to release the other foot, the problem with that one though was that not only was it webbed but it was truly deformed. Again while Trevor held the chick, I spread out her toes and did my best to cut only webbing and not toe tissue. To be honest, I didn’t do as good a job on that foot, there was just too much deformation to see what was what.

The entire procedure (both feet) took about 5 minutes.

You can already see the difference in the right foot.

Afterward, I put more Ora-gel on the feet, slathered on antibiotic ointment and then we put her in a crate with clean newspaper. She left little blood spots for a few hours and then the wounds clotted and she stopped bleeding (make sure the chick has access to water at all times, even a little bit of blood loss means a lot of fluid loss for a chick.)

Once she stopped bleeding we reintroduced her food. She’s still a baby and we have her on medicated food (we keep all chicks on medicated feed until about 5 weeks), in this particular case, I think the medicated food was a stroke of luck on our part.

The right foot almost looks normal, the other one, still not so much.

Charlie seemed the most calm when she was near another member of her flock and so Trevor spent hours holding her in his shirt while he studied for his upcoming finals. When we did put her in the cage, she was definitely favoring that one foot (the more deformed one) and at times would stand on one leg with the foot tucked under her doing her best flamingo impression.

Almost immediately, though you could see that she was able to stand more upright and could walk with more balance, the better of the two foot’s difference was remarkable.

I checked on Charlie this morning and although she is doing fine, when I looked at the deformed foot, I could see that it looks like the top knuckle of her middle toe, although released from the neighboring toe, is still fused downward (imagine bending your finger so that the top segment touches the bottom segment). If that’s the case, then her toe-nail is going to grow inward instead of outward. Not good.

I’m going to let her fully recover from this, give it a few days and then see if she might need another tiny release on that one toe. (This all needs to be done when the chicks are as young as possible so that the toes can grow right as they gain weight – for this operation, Charlie was 1 week old.)

As I’ve stated, webbed toes are a genetic condition that you don’t want introduced to or perpetuated in your flock, for the most part these chicks are usually destroyed.

Just not in our part.

We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light 

~ Mary Dunbar

Have a great weekend, folks. Back on Monday with some stories about Charlie (who has become the love of our lives) including accounts of the always popular game: “Where’s Charlie?”

Today I wanted to show you some of the photos I took at the Northeastern Poultry Congress just to give you an idea of the diversity there is in the chicken world.

Female Black Polish

The female Black Polish (as opposed to the photos of the male yesterday) wear Dandilion puffs on their heads.

Unfortunately I don’t have the names of the breeds for all these birds but I loved the pattern on this one, enough to take a closer look.

And then we have this stunning breed. (There’s a mama hen somewhere who loves this little guy.)

Some of the birds were big on tail bling.

Here’e the rest of him.

Some chickens were just BIG.

It's tough to see the size but this guy was HUGE!

And some preferred to be, well, a tad more elegant.

And although this one is a goose, she looked like a Cinderella with her beautiful feathered ball gown.

Even though this guy is a turkey. I just had to include him. That thing on his neck  just fascinates me.

And then as it was a poultry show, I saw a few of these, because, as we all know,  when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.

When I went to the Northeastern Poultry Congress this past weekend, it hadn’t occurred to me that Jan Brett would be there. And not only there but with her polish chickens, no less!!

As a mother of 6 I have read (and re-read, and re-read) many childrens’ books illustrated by Jan. She has beautiful illustrations that are as calming to adults as they are to children.

I’ve even contacted Jan (through her agent) about an article I was writing on hen houses. Here’s a little fact – Jan has noise insulated hen houses for her roosters.

After I had left the Willy Wonka of chicken salesrooms, I walked down the hall to the exhibition hall.

Gasp. The first thing I saw was a row of Black Polish show birds. After having just decided I couldn’t buy any (because they were sold in pairs) this was just cruel. Life was taunting me.

But still, I can appreciate beauty when I see it. I approached the birds, slowly working my way down the row talking and cooing to them as only a chicken lover does, telling them all how pretty they were.

And then I came upon a woman in an apron who was taking some of her birds out of the cages and spraying their feathers. Must be the owner. I went back to the birds.

Record scratch. Wait a minute.

Black Polish show birds, woman owner (in a very cute apron) = Jan Brett.

“Are you Jan?” I asked preferring not to say what I was actually thinking which was “OH. MY. GOD, YOU’RE JAN BRETT, RIGHT?”

She looked at me and smiled. “Yes,” she said, “I am.”

“I write about chickens I started telling her. “I have a flock at home and I’ve always lusted for a Black Polish. You have absolutely stunning birds.” I told her.

“Thank you.” And then she said, “Would you mind holding this one for a few minutes while I clean up?”

Would I mind?

She put one of her male birds into my arms where he docilely sat while I stroked his back.

“His name is Pasquale,” she told me.

I was talking to Jan Brett, holding one of her birds at a chicken show. Life is kind of good sometimes.

Jan Brett's Pasquale

“Such a calm bird,” I said. Jan went on to tell me a little about the breed and how lovely and gentle they were.

I then asked her about her hen houses and if she really did have a noise insulated one. She said that she did but that she only used it for the roosters in the winter, in the summer, all her birds were allowed out.

“It’s to keep some of the noise down for the neighbors,” she said.

Oh, don’t I know about that, sister. I thought, now lusting not only after her birds but her noise insulating hen house.

I then talked to her about her chickens, I knew from my article research that she was introduced to the breed when she needed models for some book illustrations.

“I fell in love with them,” she said,.

“That’s what happened with me,” I said, “I had a few chickens and then I fell in love with them. I had no idea they had such interesting personalities. It only takes one to get you going.”

“Exactly,” said Jan, as she put down her supplies and got her final bird ready.

Eventually she gently took Pasquale from my arms and put him back into his cage. Not wanting to look too much like a groupie, I thanked her and walked away.

Afterward, I was thinking, no one is going to believe this story, so I turned around and took a photo of Jan walking away, that’s her in the green shirt.

And here she is talking to someone who sigh is buying a pair of her chickens.

Here’s where I have to remind you that I’m really not a stalker, but come on, someone who works with books and who loves chickens? That’s like telling me not to come home from a chicken show with any more chickens.

Toward the end of the day when her booth had slowed down (because most of her chickens were sold) I talked to her again.

Jan Brett with one of her birds

“Do you mind, if I gather up some of your chicken’s feathers?” I asked.

She gave me permission and like a fan gathering the tossed off towel of a rock star, I picked up the beautiful black and white feathers. It’s not time for me to have a Jan Brett Black Polish right now, but as far as I’m concerned, I have the next best thing.

Jan Brett's Black Polish Chicken feathers

And as an added bonus, here’s an extra shot of Pasquale – ahem, AWARD winning Pasquale (I got to hold an award winning bird, she giggled.)