Want Chickens, but need to convince wife!

[Scottmac83]

Hello all,

I live in the UK (NE England), and I have been getting into gardening during lockdown, with a veg garden and a small orchard.
Next on my list is chickens. I have never kept chickens before, although I have kept hutch animals as pets and I have often been hawk rabbit hunting with my friends birds of prey. I want 3-4, primarily for egg laying to supplement my garden as I expect food prices to go up this year.

My only obstacle is my wife who thinks they will smell, take a lot of time cleaning and - most crucially - will be noisy which our quiet neighbourhood will not appreciate to say the least.

Can you please tell me if my wife’s fears are correct, and if there are any types of chickens which are quiet / behavioural tricks to keep the noise down.

Thanks

Scott

 

[Marigold]

Hi Scott, welcome to the Forum, and to the chicken conspiracy club.

Your setup sounds ideal for keeping chickens. Please reassure your wife that, like any animal, they will only smell if their living quarters are not kept clean. Most of us have our birds in an enclosed run, (minimum size 2 sq. metres per hen,) and we put absorbent bedding on the floor of the run and in the coop. This is often Aubiose (shredded hemp stems, made mainly as horse bedding) which is highly absorbent and doesn’t go mouldy even if wetted by rain. We poo pick every day, a task which takes less then five minutes for 3-4 hens, and is easy to do because the poo gets coated with the bedding. It makes a superb addition to your compost heap. So, with sufficient space, and regular care, your hen run will not smell unpleasant. And the hens themselves don’t smell at all.

So long as you don’t get a cockerel, they won’t be noisy enough to disturb your neighbours. Hens do talk to each other all the time, and this is generally a lovely contented soothing noise, a whole variety of different kinds of cluckings. When one of them has laid an egg, she will emerge from the nestbox and sing her egg song for a few minutes. This is in order to inform the cockerel that she’s now ready for another go, as her egg passage is no longer blocked by an egg on its way down. She will do this even if there’s no cockerel, but it only lasts a minute or two, and is less noisy than, for instance, a neighbour’s own barking dog, or kids playing in their garden. Quite a lot of the time, they don’t make any noise at all. They just sit in the sun, or on a perch looking out over the garden, and have a nap. Most complaints about chicken noise refer to cockerels crowing very early on summer mornings, which can really upset people, but if you stick to hens only, you won’t go wrong.

There’s lots of help and advice on here, about planning your run and coop, what sort of birds to get, and how to keep them. I’m sure your wife will be delighted at having a reliable supply of really fresh eggs on tap, the shop eggs are always comparatively old and don’t taste nearly so good as your own fresh ones. You also know where they’ve come from, and how well the birds were being treated. If you get 3-4 birds you will have about 2 dozen eggs a week for the first year, when the girls are laying at their best, so your neighbours can be brought on board with gifts of the ones you have to spare.

Do keep in touch and let us know how it goes. If you have the space for them, chickens are just lovely to have around - not only for eggs, but they’re comparatively undemanding pets, don’t have to be taken out for walks, have simple needs, but are endlessly entertaining, each with her own different personality, and much more intelligent than you would imagine if you’d never got to know them individually. If you get a collection of young hybrid layers, each from a different breed, they will all be different colours and could also lay different coloured eggs, brown, white, cream, blue or green, depending on your choice of breed.

 

[Icemaiden]

Nicely said, Marigold!