There ain't nobody here...

but us chicken. And how we got them here.    

18th of January 2025

Beginning chickens for beginners

Feathers, eggs and just a whole bunch of love and laughter, that’s what chickens are all about. Don’t believe me? Well keep reading. This story is a little older and I’m trying to catch up with my blog but I love this story and there is some advice I can pass on to the next lover of chickens. My first advice? Read this!

My mother always wanted chickens but decided not to because of the smell they would produce. Now Marco had chickens before me and told me it’s all not as hard as it seems and they are a lot of fun. And thus, the dream began. It took us 2 years before we finally got ourselves some chickens and the story begins with a museum in Barneveld.

Choosing your chicken

Anyone that knows me knows I like to be different. Marco used to have Silkies, Marco’s family, had Silkies. Silkies just seemed to be the chicken everyone wanted. Naturally this was not the chicken I’d get. I wanted to pick my own. And to find one that fitted, we went to a museum in the egg heart of the Netherlands. Here I decided that I didn’t want some foreign race but an ancient Dutch chicken. To keep the Dutch chicken races alive. Because we don’t have a lot of space we opted for a smaller chicken and ended up with three races: Kraaikoppen (Crow heads), Kuifhoenders (Crested Chickens) and Sabel-poot krieltjes (Sabre-legged bantem). They are kind chickens, decent egg layers and interesting looking.

Cooped up

This is where the fun starts. My first idea was to get a secondhand chickencoop off the internet. Because well, cheap. But it was hard to transport and I didn’t have a car with a towbar yet. After a while Marco told me about the number of pallets that they had at work and how they just gave these away. I asked if I could have a few. Just to see if building my own chicken coop was an option. This wasn’t a problem and his employer even lend us a car to transport the pallets. After a few days in the yard, with curious neighbors looking over the fence and asking all manner of questions, I finished the night enclosure. Having finished this, I felt confident we could build the rest of the enclosure ourselves as well. We made a little investment on the roof, because we don’t want to clip the wings of our chickens and these are the more areal type of chickens, and a couple of sturdy poles. I even managed to get us a good deal on 2-meter-tall chicken wire and we started building once the weather was nice. As this was already late May/early June all that was required for the appropriate weather, was a minimum of patience.

Finding our feathery friends

With the coop all done, we needed to get a small assortment of items, i.e. a feeder and a watering solution. And these were easily acquired at the local farming supply shop. Now all that was left were the chickens and feed. At this point I had already done my share of investigating and I kept returning to this one store in the south west of the Netherlands near Gouda. They were open on a Monday and that being the only weekday both Marco and I are regularly available we hopped in a car and drove down there. We were very excited to meet some chickens and knew we would probably take them home the same day. The shop had two of our races in stock. And luckily their enclosures were side by side. Now all that was left was for Marco to tell me his preferred. I had already decided I like the Sabre-legged bantums best. The other contender was the crested chicken. The sales lady let us sit in front of each open enclosure for a while to see how the chickens would react to us. Obviously their first reaction was to back up but the Sabre’s quickly started to get curious and approach us. They seemed calm and friendly and we liked their demeanor straight away. The crested chickens on the other hand walked like ninjas. They were very beautiful and funny looking chickens but because they had a harder time seeing us, because of their hairdo, their reaction was more shocked and erratic. I think it took us around half an hour going between the two chickens to make a choice. We landed on the Sabre’s because we wanted cuddly chickens and these seemed to be most fitting.

Coop sweet coop

Driving home with our three new feathered friends. Deciding who would be called what. They made the most adorable squeaky toy noises. I was in love. When we got home it was pouring with rain but we couldn’t keep the chickens in the house. We ended up filling their feeding troth, water bowl and night enclosure with the appropriate items. And we carefully let our sweet baby chickens get used to their new home. The following days we started feeding them from our hands. Within 3 days they ate out of our hands after which I tried to teach them to walk onto our hands. We’re now a couple of months in and I’m still crazy about our chickens. They lay these adorable little eggs which we’ve decided we must see hatch one day. And although they prefer to sit on the pole, we bring them into their night enclosure every night to sleep and let them out every morning with fresh water and feed. The smell isn’t what I’d expected. A little bit of care and you can barely smell them.

Conclusion

I want to finish this post with a picture of my beautiful darlings: Oppenheimer, Einstein and Hawking. They bring us so much joy, feathers and eggs and I can’t wait to see how my baby will learn to take care of them and love them and play with them.