There is something very relaxing about watching chickens go about their wanderings. I have heard their scratching and foraging compared to Zen meditation, and although I’m not successful at sitting still long enough to meditate, those chickens look like they have it figured out. I recently got a copy of The Way of the Hen: Zen and the Art of Raising Chickens by Clea Danaan, and I will let you know what I learn. Our flock has been taking advantage of the mild weather and expanding their daily wanderings up and down the driveway to find bugs and seeds to round out their diet. For a while there we were not getting any eggs, and had started to consider fencing the chickens inside a run to stop the sneaky hidden nest shenanigans. Now we are finally starting to see some eggs in the nesting box again, so I am in full support of their foraging as long as we keep getting eggs.
Perhaps you are wondering who this new fancy, feathered fellow is?
He is the offspring of my old Silver Crested Polish rooster on the farm in Elmira, Tom Bombadil, and an Aracauna hen. Tom Bombadil died not long after the kids discovered a hidden nest of fluffy headed chicks in the garden at their Dad’s house, so it is nice having this young rooster to carry on his legacy. We got him along with a couple other hens from the old farm in the fall and they made a nice addition to our homestead flock.
The new rooster and Little Red Rooster are getting along nicely, and the hens seem to feel more confident wandering down the driveway to the grassy hillside under the grape vines in the company of a bigger rooster. They used to hang out there a lot with Paul Bunyan when he was alive, so it is good to see them frequenting that spot again.
They have been frequenting it a lot, in fact.
In addition to eggs and bug patrol, I think one of the biggest benefits of free range chickens is the daily dose of calm you get from watching them forage. They have their own peaceful agenda going on in spite of our busy lives going on around them, and they carry it out methodically and in no hurry. It is very possible that chickens are Zen masters.
If we pay attention, they may have a lesson to teach us.
I decided a long time ago that if I had to pen my chickens I'd stop keeping them. Yes you sometimes lose one to a predator, but it is so very calming to allow them to wander about at will, doing their "chicken thang" that I just can't bear to pen them. We do lock them in their coop at night and let them out again every morning, but they have the run of our place (and our neighbors place, luckily we have good neighbors that we keep in eggs) all day long. It also makes for far richer and tastier eggs, and a smaller feed bill! I enjoyed seeing your chickens being chickens!
I feel really good about free ranging them too. I bet your neighbors appreciate having chickens they don't have to care for and they get eggs! Living at the edge of the woods, there are so many places for them to hide their eggs that sometimes we won't get any for a while, so we are still working on solving that dilemma. Sometimes we find a secret nest when it rains and they roll down the hill!
LOL! That is the worst part. We have one hen that loves to hide her eggs, and actually she leads the other hens astray. And as soon as we find her nest, she moves it again. So that always does create a dilemma!
We have a couple hens like that too! Always trying to get the other girls to sneak off to use the secret nests. Those chickens…