Earlier this year, I decided it was time to start raising a flock of chickens.  I love the taste of fresh, farm-raised eggs.  The dogs do too, as matter of fact.  I found a lady an hour away who sells a variety of chickens when they’re 5 weeks old and ready to go straight into a coop.  I got lucky and snagged a coop on sale (yay, sale!), and put it together the weekend before I picked up the chickens.  As a spur-of-the-moment thing, I also bought a few chicks from Tractor Supply, which I raised in a brooder box in my living room.  I will NOT be doing that again.

Cletus, the lighter ball of fluff in the above picture, is a Naked Neck roo who rules his flock with an iron wing.  I have a Naked Neck hen, three Easter Eggers, two Barred Rocks, two Black Jersey Giants, two Rhode Island Reds, and one Golden Comet.

I’d had the older chicks a couple of days when I realized that the coop would quickly become too small for them to be in 24/7, and knew I needed to build a pen.  No worries there – I’ve put up a lot of fencing since I moved to this place.  I got my supplies and the next Sunday morning I started on the fence.  My very first post, I cut the phone line.  Oops…I’d forgotten those wires ran that close to the house on that side.  It took a few days to get everyone out to mark the utilities (and repair the phone line), but within a week, I had a good-size pen built for my little flock.  They were thrilled with the freedom, at first – then they decided it wasn’t good enough.

I came home from work one day and found a distressed chicken on the wrong side of the fence.  Okay, no problem, just a one-off.  Nope.  Once that hen started letting herself out, others followed.  After a few days of chasing chickens back into their pen so I could let the dogs out, I gave up.  You want out?  Fine, you’re out.  I started letting the chickens free range during the day and taking the dogs out on leash.  The chickens were happy, but the dogs weren’t.  Then some of the hens started ending up on the wrong side of the 5’ yard fence.  I just kept waiting for one of them to find its way into the dog pen…

I could fix this – I just needed to learn how to clip chicken wings.  I checked online and found some basic instructions.  Clipping wings looked easy enough, and everything I found said to do just one wing so the chicken would be off balance.  Seems reasonable.  Oh, wait…how do I do this by myself?  I only have two hands, and I have to hold the chicken, spread the wing, and clip the feathers, all without hurting the chicken or myself in the process.  Hmmmm…..  I finally found a video that showed a woman hanging a chicken by the feet using a grooming noose, which left her with both hands free to spread the wing and clips the feathers.  Sure, I can do that.  Except it turns out, I couldn’t.

I decided to do it one morning, pulling them one at a time out of the coop.  I tried it first with the easiest of the hens, and that girl just would not relax while hanging upside down.  She was flapping and flailing and doing everything she could to make the job impossible.  Okay, next option.  I managed to very awkwardly hold the chicken on her back, nudge a wing out a bit, and cut one or two feathers at a time.  This method nearly got a few of the hens stabbed with the scissors when they struggled, and left me with several scratches from their toe nails.  But I did manage to get nearly all of them done this way.

Then it was Cletus’ turn.  I’d saved him for near the end because I really didn’t want a ticked off rooster chasing me around the pen.  I used the net to catch him and drag him out of the coop, and as I reached for him, I had a flash of inspiration.  Leaving him on the ground, tangled in the net, I reached in and pulled a wing just past the net’s frame.  With a quick snip, snip, snip, all of his flight feathers were on the ground.  Amazing!  Quick, easy, and no one got hurt!  I did the same with the last three girls in less time than it took me to do any of the other hens.  Why did I not find this suggestion anywhere on the internet?  I mean, really, I can’t be the only person who has to do these sorts of things alone.

So, everyone has a clipped wing, and everyone has stayed safely in the pen since then.  Not to worry, though, they’ll be free ranging again soon enough.  I want to make sure all of the girls know to lay eggs in the nesting boxes (the older girls just started laying, and the younger girls haven’t started yet), and then I’ll work out a schedule that keeps both the chickens and the dogs happy.