Friday 24 January 2014

My New Additions

Meet Henrietta, Cynthia, Dory, Billina, Nugget and Funky.


Funky

These are my new girlies.  I never had any experience of hens before my work experience in June 2013, where I was thrown in at the deep end with 100,000 hens.  What I had not realised till then was that they were friendly. Most of them wanted affection when I was walking round looking after them, when we were in the pullets barn with the stable door, if we just had the bottom door shut, they would fly up to it and wait for us to stroke them. 
One of the pullets in the pullet barn

Henrietta and Billina on their first day
So after June I was on a mission to persuade my parents to allow me to get chickens!  This was going semi-well but after being away on work experience all summer there were doubts as to whether they would get dumped with all the work.  However after exam results came out I had my final persuading power!  So after exams when my parents asked what I wanted as a reward for doing well in exams - as any normal 16 year old girl would say - I would like some hens.


Funky again
The plan was to re-home 6 hens from the commercial farm that I worked at.  The colony birds were going in July. Colony being the new system of caged birds with 60-70 birds in one bigger cage with access to a perch and a scratch matt and a curtained off area to lay in.  However this was too soon and so I ended up getting some free range birds.

  The term free-range is misleading however, as although it is better than colony in the fact that they can move around and escape whoever is top of the pecking order, free range actually means no more than 9 birds per square meter and has access to outside space.  9 birds per square meter is quite cramped and although there are barriers splitting each barn into 3 mini sections to prevent birds piling up in one area, it usually is very very densely packed with birds in one area and not so densely packed in others. Although they do have outside space they are not encouraged to go out so no food or water is out there, as the farmers don't want them outside because every degree above or below their optimum temperature means money lost on food that gives energy for egg production.  As a result lots of birds they don't venture out because as pullets and chicks they were inside they don't want to go out to the scary place that is outdoors.

(Also just for a bit of other knowledge just because the eggs say organic on them it doesn't mean that they were free range.  Organic birds can be reared in a colony system and just fed organic food.)

My girls are settling in really well and I think it is a fantastic opportunity because I now can gain an insight into differences in the husbandry between keeping them commercially and keeping them as pets.
The first egg 3/1/14


No comments:

Post a Comment