Dust bath

Conventional wisdom suggests that chickens with access to a dust bath suffer less from ectoparasites. My expectation was that the chickens would tear the lawn to shreds quite readily and make their own dust baths. But after four days, the lawn looks essentially the same. Monday morning, Clarissa was hanging around by the gate. Hilda noticed that her motivation was not escape, but the dirt around the base of the post where we’d dug in the PVC pipes. So I got the shovel and shaved off a bit of sod. I made the dust bath about the size of one chicken because what? I thought they would take turns? Please. I should have known my girls better than that. It was just another excuse to have a fight.

At first they just pecked at it, either because they found something good to eat, or they wanted gravel for their gizzards, or they simply wanted to check it out, and their beaks are their best sensory organs. What if they didn’t know how to bathe in the dust? If this was something they needed to learn from their mom, they were out of luck. Even if I were willing to roll around in the dirt (which I wasn’t), it seemed unlikely that chickens would be able to learn anything from my demonstration. Luckily, Julia came to the rescue. Just as she took the lead in eating caterpillars (another thing I wasn’t willing to do myself), she pushed her way through the crowd, gave the dirt a couple of good scratches, flopped down, and started fluffing her feathers in the dust. Innate behavior wins the day again! Others followed, and it got quite competitive. And 15 minutes later, it was all over. The girls retreated to the coop to hang out in the shade.

Checking out the hole in the sod

 

Ellie, Ingrid, and Sara compete for the dust bath while
Clarissa wonders what I'm looking at.

Monday night, our friend Diane came to dinner. We hadn’t seen her in a long time, and what with eating and visiting, it got to be 8:30 before we knew it. The sun was going down. Hilda excused herself to put the chickens to bed. To our surprise and delight, they were already in the coop. Victory! They know where they belong at night. It was a cool evening. Eight of the chickens were jammed together on the east side of the roost. Two were in the west corner. We have decided to put the girls to bed a little later, when all we have to do is shut the door.

Eight chickens all in a row

Two outcasts on the other end of the perch

Today we harvested the garlic. At our previous house, we had an old hog shelter that had a roof but no walls. It was a great place to dry onions and garlic. After some discussion, we decided to hang the garlic under the deck. Hilda was concerned that it would get wet when it rained. I know that it is never going to rain again, so I am not worried. If it does rain ever again, I expect that the garlic will dry out quickly afterward. We tied the bundles of garlic to the netting Terry put up to keep the robin from flying at our living room window. We got a nice crop of garlic this year. But what are we going to do with 200+ bulbs of garlic?

Digging the garlic


Hilda hangs the garlic under the deck

Some of our better garlic bulbs

Tonight all 10 chickens were on the east side of the perch. Ellie was on the west end of the line and tried to walk over the others. I’m not sure where she thought she was going to fit in. There was not a millimeter of space between the roosting chickens. Whatever her intent, Ellie only accomplished a disturbance of the peace after which she landed on the floor. We filled the food, changed the water, and left them to sort it out.