We are in southern New Hampshire and bought birds to appease the wife, who thinks we have a farm (we have a barn and some land) and felt that chickens were the thing to get. Up until then, we would go 1/4 mile up road to get eggs from someone else who raised them, nice eggs at $3/dozen.. We bought a cold weather variety called Canadian Chantecler; they are all white, if that matters. We got 30 and picked them up from the breeder (he was in New York state), and he gave a couple extra so we had 33 total. They were supposed to be roughly half boys/half girls, and when they were a year old or so, we found a young couple who slaughtered animals and wanted to get into processing chickens to come to our place and they killed, plucked and packed into plastic 23 of the boys (we had 24 boys and 9 girls, not the half/half we expected). The birds looked big due to lots of feathers, but killed and in freezer, they weigh about 4 pounds each. Usually, I cook them in a crockpot and we get a few meals from each cooked bird.
We got some electric fencing and set it up with solar charger and battery but birds would still get out sometimes, I guess we should have clipped their wings, but I don't know how to do that, so we'd spend time chasing them back into fenced area. During winter, we get more snow, the electric fencing would short out and we just started letting the birds roam free. Just before Christmas, our 10 birds were out as usual, and I came home from work to find that 5 birds had been attacked and killed, and we had 5 left. A neighbor said we must have had weasel as two dead birds had heads missing- body was still there- and supposedly that is what weasels do- never found the other three. So, we moved the coop into the garage and kept the remaining 5 birds in it for a couple of months. Finally, we started letting them out after we came home from work so we could watch them. Now with the weather warming and sun setting later, plus I am working from home, the birds go out around noon, and I check on them every hour or so. When dusk starts to occur, the birds go back by themselves into the coop, and we close it up with hook so it is locked. One bird died a month ago so we now have four- not sure what happened to bird, it was out with others at one check, and 1 hour later, it was upside down with feet in air with other birds pecking nearby as if nothing happened. Oh well, animals die I guess.
We do get eggs, about 2-3 a day from the four birds we have. Nice white eggs, sometimes the shape is a little weird, the yolk is rich yellow/orange. We give them organic layer pellets, and I don't think we are saving any money from when we were just buying from the neighbor, but in some ways it is fun having the birds. But, we have to make plans for other people to care for them if we go away. Also, when the birds are outside, we have to check on them every so often. We probably will set up the electric fencing so the birds won't be in coop all the time unless we let them out, and also we won't have to check on them each hour or two. Also, there is a lot of chicken poop everywhere and we have to be careful walking in the yard. The grass gets greener, but we can't just walk casually about either without looking where we step.
Were it up to me, I'd let other people raise chickens and I'd just buy the eggs from them- I think the birds are a lot of work, they aren't saving us any money, at some point you have to kill and pluck them to eat them, and they intrude in our schedule. But, they do give us eggs, they do make our life "richer" or more full in some ways, and we appreciate more all the work that all farmers and people who work in the food industry do for us.
