Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Have you kept free range poultry?

Our area is starting to have lots of Lyme disease carrying ticks. I got it last year and a few neighbors have gotten it this Summer. My wife decided we needed to start keeping guinea fowl along with a few chickens. I'm REALLY glad it was her idea. She is easy going about most things but plants and flowers are her thing.

We mail ordered the chicks 12 weeks ago. They get bolder every day. We converted a green house into "The Poultry Palace". When we open the door in the AM it's like race horses coming out of the gate. They have become feathered earth moving equipment. The flowers are gone, the shrubbery is in decline and the yard and driveway is full of dust bath pot holes.

If I don't get the poop hosed off right away it turns to concrete. I'm going to need a pressure washer... The "Palace" is maybe 10 feet from the bedroom window.... I was expecting early AM crowing but at least one of the roosters "snore crows" It isn't a full volume crow but the sound still carries at all hours of the night.

I'm pretty sure there is not a tick left within a few hundred yards of the house now. I was hoping to train them to follow us for walks out back around the pond. We keep about a mile of walking trail mowed out there. They will do almost anything for frozen or canned corn but walking out the forest road isn't one of those things yet. It's like they hit a force field when we get to the woods area. It must be an instinct thing about not going into areas they can't see threats coming from a distance?

I don't care much that the land scape is looking more like a war zone out there... not much weed eating to do anymore.... I can't believe my wife is ok with this though.... again I'm just really glad it was her idea to get them in the first place.

The flock behavior is interesting to me. We ended up with 3 brown leghorn roosters. The guinea males don't reach sexual maturity until they are quite a bit older... maybe this Spring. Each rooster is leading around about 1/3 of the guineas currently. Apparently they can cross breed (they are trying now) but the off spring are not very hardy if they do bred .

Overall we are not seeing the kind of aggression that can occur. Reading suggests that free range birds get along better because they are never bored. Reading also suggests that when the male guineas do mature they become like feathered Rottweilers.

I'm interested in what others have experienced keeping poultry. Do you think I'll ever get them to follow me through the woods to the back field area? How much do I need to spend on a pressure washer? The electric ones are less expensive, no idea if they would be enough to manage the poo situation though...

Yes

My Labrador retriever loved them. They were apparently delish.

We had a about a hundred of em’ when I was a kid. All colors, makes and models. They ranged far and wide. Snakes became almost non-existent.
The banty’s would nest up in the loft of the barn in the hay. Eventually they would show up in the barnyard with 7 or 8 little chicks. How they got them out of the loft is beyond me.

Our lab passed away years ago. We had an English setter while we BRIEFLY had a dozen guineas several years ago. Gracie's mission in life was to dig under the pen the guineas were huddled up in. The birds busted loose and flew off before she got to them though. Probably back to the farm we got them from....

I just saw this

Coyotes got one of the free rangers last fall. They mostly stay in the Gulag unless I'm out in the yard with them. Coyotes in daytime are not welcome.

The one I keep separate from the flock will follow me if I have the container of scratch they get every evening before sundown. Haven't tried getting her to go very far though. And she comes to the front yard/driveway when I feed the quail and jays every morning without me even shaking the can.

And the flower beds have short chicken wire fences on them to keep the chickens out, or they ruin them.

Don't know about ticks, hardly see any around here. Too many deer, coyotes, foxes, skunks, cats, rats etc for them to bother with humans. And our dogs take some kind of pill for them.

Keep us informed how many you lose the first year.

If you are serious about keeping ticks off of you in your yard, cut every tree down, and I know this sounds crazy. I have neighbors that got lyme disease from working in the yard, lots of trees. Pines grow ticks in particular.

Ticks fall out of trees, and are in the grass.

If you can avoid Lyme disease, do it at all costs.

Many here in the South, cut down every tree when they buy a new house. Choice is, kids and wife with lyme disease or nice yard with trees.

Had them when I was a kid. They had a rough life: dogs didn't bother them, but the ponies sometimes took a notion to tap-dance on them, lost some to hawks. I once watched a redtail snatch one up and fly up a few hundred feet, then lose it's grip. Poor little banty plummeted like a rock, flapping it's stubby, little wings all the way...

Had free range chickens when I was a kid, usually about 40-50 in the flock at any given time.

They are tick eating machines, no doubt about that. My mom sold lots of eggs. Even in the '70s, "free range chicken eggs" were a thing with health-conscious suburban housewives.

They do tear up the yard pretty badly, but we would fence off the garden with chicken wire to keep them away from the beans and peas. We let them wander amongst the pumpkins, melons, potatoes, and tomatoes though. Those big green worms that eat the leaves didn't stand a chance. Every evening the chickens went into a closed up chicken house to keep them safe from foxes and coyotes.

We'd butcher several hens every year for our own consumption, and lose a few more every winter. After a couple of moultings, egg production would drop off, and into the stew pot they'd go. We always kept just one rooster though. If we got in a load of chicks, we'd butcher and eat any roosters before they reached full maturity.

Good times. Thanks for sparking those memories.

I got Lyme disease 1 1/2 years ago while I was going through a bad back stage. I was not out in the yard at all. The little monster got me while I was just sitting on the porch. I thought it was a sweat bee sting.

My wife is a doc and they had been seeing a big increase of Lyme's in their practice. She came home with a big bottle of antibiotics' and told me to take every last one of them on time... I generally hate taking any kind of antibiotic they really mess with my digestive tract. I could tell she was serious about it so I complied. The bullseye rash showed up a few days later.

We free range our chickens and they seem to want to go only so far from their coop. Like you I've never been able to get them to go to other parts of our property either.

The answer seems to be to get one of the portable coops they sale if you want get them to travel.

We had quite a few at one time, let them run free and do their thing. Had quite a few hatch outs and ended up with about 50/50 roosters and hens. Lots of fighting and lots of pre dawn singing. They roosted in the bushes and trees. The dog rescue lady across the highway had some free range chicken killers and also varmints moved in and started breaking up nests and killing setting hens despite our best efforts. I wasn't in any mood to have a bunch of captive fowl behind a coon, possum, and dog proof enclosure. My little girl caused quite an uproar when she offed a canine chicken killer with her .243. After awhile attrition got us down to 5 roosters that roosted every night in a tree outside our guest bedroom. Then the owls got all but one bantam that ended up dying of old age. As long as there were a good many chickens around bugs were scarce and guests wouldn't stay more than 1 or 2 nights. The birds ate ticks, spiders, grasshoppers, and even lizards and little garter snakes. Several years ago we had some Guinea fowl but the highway got them.

Chicken life outside the wire

Sonovabitch

Used to leave them roam. They just tore everything up and [bleep] all over the place.
If they stayed out in the yard it wouldnt be so bad but they have to get up on the deck and front porch and just crap everywhere.

I ended up with an infection in my little toe that turned it black and sent red streaks up my leg. Wife blamed it on chickenschit. No more roamers.
We keep a few in a run with a coop for eggs.

Pop used to have some guinea fowl that ran loose. They seemed alright. Kept their distance from the house and stayed off the deck. They all got gobbled up by whatever.

Chickens don’t mind heavy cover one bit. What they don’t like to do is get too far from where they spend the night.

They're not likely to follow you far. They will follow for curiosity and food, but they're foragers by nature and unless you are traveling at the pace of a small forager, they're not likely to stay focused on your migration. Every bird's personality is unique though, and I don't doubt there are exceptions to my general characterization.

I don't have advice on the pressure washer. I've had (but no longer have) a gas powered one from Costco that I know would work well but has drawbacks (chiefly noise and fumes (not suitable for use in buildings)). I'd kind of like to have one that was powered by a heavy-duty universal motor. You know, some macho three-phase thing would be great but I'd settle for a 2HP Dayton on a 20A circuit of one leg of my split-phase service (120V). I could have a Honda-powered compressor for less money than just the electric motor though. Been thinking about a wimpier electric one lately just for the vehicles but my use is different than yours, so I couldn't say.

I kept guinea fowl in recent years and now keep chickens. I loved the guinea fowl, but my neighborhood isn't amenable to the constant noise of the hens. They were rehomed to a ranch with more than 40 acres. The flock's alarm noise is much louder but never sounded without cause and always silenced whenever the cause was removed -- like a good, loud, dog. My chickens now are hens only, and while some hens can raise a racket especially after laying, mine are mild.

My wife's garden is enclosed. The birds would decimate it, and the dog isn't very sensitive about it either. The birds do have access to the rest of the yard. They can indeed dig holes for dust bathing and they never stop moving the land. Use ground cover in landscaped areas, otherwise they will moonscape it and then it will be muddy in winter and spring. Turf grass is good if it's kept healthy. Where I don't have grass, I use rocks. Walnut-sized rocks are too small and the birds will mess them up and scatter them all over making more work than they prevent. Baseball sized rock or larger is needed to keep the birds from re-landscaping. I get river rock at no cost from the river. I can also get scoria (bubbly volcanic rock) from another area on public land. So I have some areas of each. At one point, I paid to have a 20-ton truck dump a load of river rock at the curb. There was also a lot of rock here when I bought the property. That saved wear and tear on my pickup hauling the bulk of it. The previous owner also had a lot of boulders (3 or 4 foot diameter) installed (that's nice because I couldn't get a tractor in the yard now). I also use the interlocking landscape wall blocks -- had six or seven pallets of those delivered. With rock, block and turf you can keep the area around the house decent. Mind you a larger flock can drop a lot of waste. I don't have such a big flock that the rocks and turf can't absorb the waste.

We free range ours during the day in summer time no problem once winter time comes “even” if there in the hen house at night possums are crafty I had a team of them burrow under my wood shed to get into the chicken house I racked my brain what it could be 2-3 every night for a week gone there ded now

Heavy cover and really steep banks.... We had the bulldozer just cut the top of a knife edge ridge off when we built here.... The yard is only 150 feet wide then it falls off at a 45 or 50 degree angle totally overgrown with sumac and thick briars on one side.... The chickens are cutting tunnels through that cover and spending a lot of time down there..... part mountain goats!

Some chicken trivia