Love this silver hen, do you have any more pictures of her?
No good ones. She's half Egyptian Fayoumi (and RIR). They're the flightiest breed I've ever encountered. Absolute nightmare chickens to work with
I would love to hear more about the management side of keeping chickens this way. How many hens and roosters do you have?
Not many at all right now. Maybe 30 hens and zero roosters. This last winter I ate, sold or gave away the majority of my flock (such as all of the Fayoumi) in preparation for this new year. I only want my favorites breeding at this point, so I've reduced my flock to them plus some purely utilitarian production chickens (who compensate for bad breeding decisions I made the last breeding season)
At the moment there's 33 chicks running around outside, with 7 eggs under another new broody, so I should have around 18 males to choose from later this year
Do they move and behave as one big flock or are there multiple smaller flocks?
Their grouping is very fluid and changes regularly throughout the day based on circumstance. Generally speaking though there's many small groups, 2-10 being normal numbers. Chickens will change back and forth from solo to a group role without a seconds hesitation many times each day. Despite this appearant chaos there's some basic groups that form regularly, such as the RIR tribe or the broody mother group
Do you still feed them or do they fully get their food from foraging? If you do feed them how much do you give?
I don't think it's physically possible for anything other than a junglefowl (or something comparable) to fully support itself from the environment
I feed the chickens here twice a day. Honestly not sure the unit of measurement on my scoop, but it looks like a standard 8 oz cup. In the winter with little to forage I gave them 2 scoops in the morning and two in the evening. Now in the spring with better forage and 33 extra developing chicks that number has went up to 3 scoops twice a day
Maybe in the future when I have more fruit growing they'll be able to sustain themselves more. Supposedly red junglefowl get the majority of their calories from fruit
About how much space does the flock actually use?
The adventurous games use no more than 2 acres. The chickens with majority production blood use half of what the games do
I've read before that wild RJF have a territory of around 300 feet in diameter, which is only 1.62 acres total. It's really surprising how little territory they use and desire
