Letting The Chickens Free Range

   So here it is, time for the chickens to free-range. What exactly does free-range mean? It means to let them roam and graze freely to find and eat bugs and vegetation without us having to do that for them. It means we have to put a gate in, so we can let the chickens come outside of their now grass-less pen.

  My handy-dandy carpenter husband went to building a gate for them. It's gorgeous, I love it! And he expanded the pen to be longer now. It's summer so he made the pen long enough to include a few trees. Of course it was no time flat that the chickens devastated the new patch of grass and all the baby trees underneath the big trees, lol.

  I let some of the chickens out once before my hubby put the improvements in. I just let half of them out through the door to the chicken house. They ran down the pen's fenceline, and the chickens still on the inside chased and ran with them. The chickens on the inside couldn't figure out how those other chickens got out there. It was too funny! They were making all kinds of noise about the unfairness of it all, lol.

  I was sooo nervous! And getting them to go back in wasn't so easy since it wasn't getting dark yet. And yet that time wasn't so far away. So I knew if I failed to get them in on my own, darkness would cause them to seek out their coop. I had read one place or another that chickens will seek shelter because they don't see well at all in the dark.

  I also read that if a chicken can't find its way back before dark it will sit right down where it is, which is dangerous of course because then it is easy prey out there in the dark. So they DO try to make it back to their coop when it is dusky to almost dark outside.

  Thus, if you are letting them out for the first few times, do it about an hour before dark, or less, just to get the ladies used to coming home and going in.

  That first couple of times we would always have a silly head or two go behind the pen (the woods come to the back of the pen and coop). They couldn't figure out what to do then to join the others. They were so afraid to let us guide them in.

  It took a couple of times for us to understnd how to herd the reluctant ones (or silly heads!) toward and through the gate. We learned to only come toward the stragglers from the opposite direction of where we want them to go. And to have another person stand off to the side to try and deter them from any detours.

  Later, we learned to use food to help signal that it's time to go into the pen. A couple of scoops of cracked corn and some chicken food pellets does wanders to get most of them in!

  Sooner or later they get it. It does get easier. And the free-ranging will do wanders for the eggs when they start laying.

  We decided that we will only free range ours after four o'clock p.m. or so. That way when they lay eggs, all of them should have done so by that time.

  And now that our chickens go out, I sit out in the yard a lot watching "chicken t.v.". It's quite entertaining and peaceful. Now my hubby does it too sometimes, and we talk. It's VERY nice!