If you're interested in keeping healthy, happy chickens, Dr Andrea Graves has written a handbook to help you along the way.
Using her knowledge from a PhD in animal behaviour and her practical experience with keeping chickens, Graves describes how we can satisfy chickens' foraging obsessions, house them well and manage their social lives.
She joins Kathryn to share her chicken-whispering secrets.
Photo: Andrea Graves
Humans and chickens go back a long way, she says.
“We've been intimately associated with chickens for 1000s of years. People kept them not so much for the eggs originally, more for kind of prophetic and religious divining purposes.”
But there does seem to be something deep inside some of us that feels that life is complete “when you've got your own little flock,” she says.
She herself has three birds on a standard suburban section. You don’t need a big space, but it must be appropriate and allow them to express themselves, she says.
“They are resolutely chicken. Chickens they're descended from jungle fowl, Southeast Asian jungle fowl, they can still breed with them so they're very closely related.
“And jungle fowl live, not in the depths of the jungle, but the jungle edges. So, a lot of the behaviours that we know that chickens need to express, to have good welfare, come within that setting.”
For example, they love to search through leaf litter, she says
“And we can collect leaves in autumn, we can put down straw or wood shavings, we can throw them weeds.
“So, keeping them on a small section is about recreating a little slice of the edge of a jungle; bit of shade, bit of sun, some perches, then you can give them a bit of some branches, you can roll back the branches every now and then and they can discover all the little insects that gather under those branches. This is what they really love to do.”
She fences her chooks in, she says.
“They'll poo on the paths, they'll poo on the deck and they'll figure out what your front door is and then they'll come inside. They'll eat your silver beet and eat your strawberries and get a little bit chaotic.
“So, a fence is really important, a good fence, but thinking about what's inside that fence.”
Graves includes trees and shrubs in the chooks’ area and makes an area where she throws in weeds.
“I make a little compost heap and just a circle of stones or bits of firewood or something like that into throw all the weeds into that area. And it breeds up of course, because when this vegetation is held together, it starts to kind of break down and lots of little organisms are bred in there.
“And so the chickens have got this one place that they can always rely upon to search through and find stuff.”
Coops can vary in design but must include certain features, she says.
"It needs to be big enough for the number of birds you've got. It must have a perch, it's really healthy for them to sleep on a perch rather than on the ground or in the nest box.
“There's been experiments done and I've drawn on all this, the academic stuff and try to interpret in a very simple way [in the book] about how chunky the perch should be.
“And it's important they have a private place to lay their eggs. So, a nest box is important, the nest box needs to be lower than the perch because they instinctively want to sleep at the high point.”
If the nest box is high they will sleep in that, she says, which they will poo in all night creating an unhealthy nest box.
There are many breeds to choose from, heritage breeds and commercial each bringing advantages and disadvantages.
“There's some beautiful heritage breeds, absolutely stunning. They have advantages other than beauty as well. They do tend to live longer but produce far fewer eggs during their life and they tend to go broody.”
This is when birds sit on their eggs in a futile attempt to hatch them, she says.
“Then they stop laying eggs, they stop eating, they get very thin. It's all very annoying.”
She prefers modern commercial breeds; hylines or brown shavers
“These birds are still gorgeous, they've got great personalities and they will lay really prolifically. But only for two or three years. That slows down dramatically after that. And they don't tend to live long healthy lives after that age, but they don't go broody or very rarely so yeah, swings and roundabouts.”
If you want chickens you should be motivated by their ‘chickenalities’ and not just as a source of cheap eggs, she says
“You do need to be committed to them. And to do that I think you have to have that really strong urge to get them but from what I detect in this country, there's plenty of people that feel like that.”
Photo: Unsplash
