I think this is interesting! I’ve always thought that our chickens could be adapted to live without commercial feed if need be(economic collapse or an apocalypse
) and it’s cool to see it working for someone.
I know that in the warmer months, my chickens barely eat their feed, but we have zero ground water around us so I’d still have to supply that. We’re in zone 5b, so it gets pretty cold, but in summer we still have a few weeks of triple digit temps out here. They even do a great job in the winter with foraging.... except the last few days, we got a big snow dump... but generally even in moderate snow, the area around the bases of large pine trees or in the smaller denser pines has a lot of duff that they can scratch in. Food plots are a good idea(we sow grass seed in some of their more open free ranging area right before a snowfall), but it’s simply not accessible under 2+ feet of snow. And regardless what people say about snow not being an adequate source of hydration, my chickens opt to ignore any water source I provide to eat snow. And they get on just fine.
Our girls have a coop and run. Their coop is well built, but uninsulated and “off grid” so no light or heat. Their run is around 400sqft, and is opened up nearly every day for free ranging. The only exceptions are in these snowiest days of winter where they have little to no interest in flopping around in snow that’s two feet deep. It’s important to us to keept these birds protected and capitalize on their homing instinct because we rely on their eggs. We have 20 dense mountainous acres in north central Washington State, and I don’t much fancy an egg hunt every day.
I agree that chickens that are raised to be more “wild” have better protective instincts, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I have commercial birds, a mix of breeds, and we lost 3 this year... one during the summer, and two in one day this winter to a hawk. During free ranging, my girls do great and keep themselves pretty darn safe... but even instincts aren’t an assurance because nature just does it’s thing. Some predators will pattern an area, but most are vagrants... seizing an opportunity if it presents itself. Our hawk attacks happened during the peak of migration, and we live in a major migratory path. There were also some weather circumstances that made it a perfect storm of criteria for an attack but I don’t need to get into it. But apart from that, we have owls, snakes, skunks, weasels, cougars, bears, bobcats, and an occasional deep winter coyote and have only lost the one. I think a lot of predation comes down to luck, frankly.
Another factor to consider is that adding a non native “wild” animal to your environment will likely push out some native breeds. We have turkeys, grouse, quail and chukar out here, and having 100% wild raised chickens could diminish or evict some of those natural birds. It’s all very case dependent, but we are hunters and like having those species around
I’m super happy this works for you, and I’m glad to see that you’re trying something new! Animals are incredibly resilient if we let them be.
Can you put a fence around the garden?
