Website design By BotEap.comRaising chickens on a poultry farm or at home as free range chickens is a very popular and lucrative occupation in our part of the country. My mother was interested in raising chickens at home and she always had several free range chickens in our backyard. She didn’t fancy breeding the landraces, which are as colorful as jungle birds, but she preferred to breed white leghorns, rhode island, black menorca, and plymouth rocks. We even had turkeys at one time!

Website design By BotEap.comThe imported breeds were not purebred and my mother crossed them. She preferred to keep Rhode Island roosters and Livorno hens. She claimed that the hybrid birds laid larger eggs over a longer period of time. She would acquire a brooding hen to sit in the clutch of her hybrid eggs.

Website design By BotEap.comIt was always so much fun for us kids to watch the eggs hatch. Newly hatched fluffy chickens had to be carefully raised on special homemade feed. Because they roamed freely, there was always a chance that some of them might be caught by kites or hawks. We had lightweight, portable bamboo tents to protect the chickens from marauding sky pirates.

Website design By BotEap.comThe moment we heard the mother hen’s warning cluck, we children would run out with the tent and gather the entire hatchling under the tent. They told us that if the fluffy chickens were dyed bright colors of green, pink or blue, the kites would be fooled into not recognizing them as food. Well, this ploy didn’t work and it would break our hearts when marauders took one or two of our pretty chickens.

Website design By BotEap.comI have never used commercial food. The homemade food included a lot of green stuff, mostly vegetable scraps from the kitchen, rice bran, and rice. My mother was very concerned about the welfare of her poultry. We were careful with the water that was provided for the birds. A veterinarian was always consulted about food supplements. We would also try to use protective measures to prevent infectious diseases of birds. But when we found a downed chicken, we removed it so the infection wouldn’t spread. Sometimes everything happened so fast that everything was affected in a couple of days. When this happened, all the birds were culled and the coop was disinfected.

Website design By BotEap.comMy mother kept careful records of the eggs produced. They were all clean and dated. Most of the eggs were used for the family, but some were given as gifts to friends and neighbors. Some were saved for a brooding hen to sit down and bring us a new batch of chicks. At one point we tried to set up a proper deep-bedded poultry shed and bred white leghorns on a small scale. On this occasion we use commercial feed, complementing it with vegetable matter from the kitchen and vitamins prescribed by the veterinarian. We had a good egg production history.

Website design By BotEap.comBut we gave up on hobby poultry because we just didn’t have the time to give them the care they needed. For me, the best memories are from the time when we had chickens of different breeds roaming freely in our yard and watching the chickens hatch from their eggs. Each child would adopt a few chickens and name them! We would be horrified when they were sold and used to mourn and wail over our loss for days on end. Keeping an eye on the new dyed chicks as they climbed up behind their ‘mother’ was a responsibility we took very seriously. I think we made more noise than the mother hen when we saw a kite circling in the sky!