What to Expect from Free Ranging Chickens?
As you can see under COOPS & RUNS, we both have lovely coops/pen designed to keep our chickens perfectly safe and … pretty happy.
Now here’s why our chickens don’t stay in their wonderful homes all the time:
Because chickens love to MOVE.
There are vivid PROS and CONS to meeting your chickens’ vital need for movement. Let’s start with the positives.
THE PROS of FREE RANGING
Chickens love to move and search and scratch and peck and roam more than we had ever imagined. You know how in movies, especially old ones depicting rural life, the chickens are out and about in the background, hither and thither, doing their thing? (If you haven’t, you will now.) That isn’t just for movie atmosphere, or something about the way farms used to be, it’s the way chickens like to live.
They also thrive on finding bugs and greens to supplement their diet. Even in a backyard, as opposed to a pasture, you see a definite difference in their physical health and the color of their eggs because of this outside enrichment.
Initially, I had the idea that the chickens would spend all, or at least most, of their time in the Coop/Pen. I would babysit them out in the yard at the end of the day for as much time as I had, or to the limit of my patience, or, during good weather, when I was busy with something else in the garden and could be their Guard Person.
This worked for about a year, and often for the last hour of the day. But they had learned that the Real World that lay beyond that hardware wire, and they started – almost from the start – pacing along the pen walls whenever they saw me. This made me unhappy. So I started letting them out a little when I wasn’t there, and then a little more. It became obvious where and how they were happiest: with maximum freedom. Our yard was fenced, so I could be reasonably sure that a dog wouldn’t get them while I was inside. Our yard is surrounded by trees, and hawks prefer not to dive down through cover; again, I felt fairly secure.
All was well for a while. And that tends to be the way with chickens; things go well for a while, and then you run into injury, illness, deaths. That doesn’t make living with them any less wonderful and worthwhile, just a bit more stressful. After an incident of some kind, there are decisions to be made or re-thought through.
Our only fatal incident so far, in nearly 4 years of free ranging, was a fluke. We were out shoveling snow and left the gate to the yard open as we went back and forth, and while the chickens wandered a little in the snow just outside the pen. Our neighbor’s dog, always otherwise on a leash, briefly off-leash, ran through the open gate and instantly killed Goldie before being called off. We’re lucky that the dog didn’t kill them all, something he could have easily done before we’d even realized what was happening.
Of course we were incredibly careful with the gate after that. But we’d learned how fast a dog – or fox – or other predator can kill, given the opportunity. Both my husband and I were shocked that on an otherwise gorgeous, and very happy winter day we suddenly found ourselves facing our beautiful Goldie dead in the snow, her blood very red against the white. It was one of the moments when you realized that a day can always hold something unexpected; that what we assume is only that.
THE CONS of FREE RANGING
Closing the gate doesn’t guarantee safety. Foxes could dig under anywhere. Hawks can fly down if they choose. On days that we see a hawk in the old oak, we keep the chickens in. That may be a feeble guard against predation, but it makes us feel that they’re a little safer. We also feel safer with a rooster around as he can alert the hens and us in case they feel threatened.
For the most part, now, the hens spend the last couple of hours of the day roaming the yard. We remind ourselves pretty frequently that this is a known risk, but makes them so obviously happy that it’s worth it. A chicken in a pen may be wandering around, but there’s not much stimulation in there – nothing new to discover.
That’s our chosen tradeoff for now. But the decision is made and re-made. Each person has to choose for themselves what seems kindest. Isn’t that always the hard thing? Being the one who has to decide, because we’ve taken on the responsibility of these other lives, and they have no say in the matter?
One thing that you also should note, that when you let your chickens free range expect chicken poop everywhere in your backyard. For the most part, it’s not a big deal and washes a way with any rain but sometimes I find myself spraying off our backyard deck where a chicken left one right in the middle. Other that these few things, I am a general fan of free ranging chickens.