New Book: Free-Range Survival Chickens

Happy Monday!

I am very pleased to announce a brand-new book by "Florida Bullfrog." He has worked for years to recreate the survival chicken breeds of the past. Birds that can free-range in high predator environments without being locked in a coop. After multiple years of work, we were able to publish his new book Free-Range Survival Chickens. It's changed the way I look at birds! He told me, "if you're losing your flocks to predators, you have the wrong chickens!"

It's a fascinating book, and very useful for anyone who wants to raise birds that can survive and thrive without factory food, expensive coops, etc.



Very glad to see him write this book. It's definitely needed right now. You can find it on Amazon, or order it from your local bookseller.

If anyone has questions, ask away. I hope to post an interview with him on YT soon.

-David

Talking with the author:

My copy arrived yesterday. I can't say whether it's a good book yet, but I'm very enthusiastic about the topic! Thanks for getting it out there.

I received this book and read it over a few days. There is a lot to consider in the book that you won't find in many "coop chicken" books. I was mainly interested to read about how the author dealt with protecting his garden.

When any of my chickens get out of whatever location I am keeping them in, they are going directly to the garden area. The author states that he has poor soil conditions and so any gardening is intensive and therefore in small areas, such as raised beds, which are easily fenced around. Our garden areas are not currently fenced in.

My takeaway from reading the book was that I (maybe you depending on your situation) have the following 3 options:

1-Fence the chickens
2-Fence the garden
3-Move the garden far away from the chickens or vice versa

This is if you are deciding to range the chickens in the way the book is written, with very little human input. You could clip wings, use electric poultry netting, etc. but that is not what the author is mainly proposing.

Decisions, decisions. Regardless of what we experiment with or try, I am glad to have read this book and intend to keep it and read again. I plan to always keep it along with the other chicken reference book I have as we experiment.

I would recommend this book to anyone considering chicken keeping or rethinking your chicken keeping style. It is really a fascinating read with a ton of information about the history of the chicken and different breeds and how we got to where we are today. Along with a lot of other very useful information.

I have just purchased this book, I'm eager to read it and put together a review here in the coming weeks.

My friends visited one of the Caribbean Islands, and the chickens were all "wild" there, and there were prohibitions again human interference with them, as they were considered an extremely valuable, organic, insect control.  However, I don't know enough to know what sort of non-human predators the chickens had to deal with.

I myself visited Kawaii Island over a decade ago. There were plenty of relatively small chickens naturalized and reproducing despite some predators and again, Humans were at least expected to leave them be and try not to run them over in parking lots etc. However, I was told that these chickens became wild after backyard "cock-fighting" flocks were released by a significant typhoon hitting the Island some time before my visit, so these chickens both had a leg up in self-defense before being free-ranged, and had already spent time adapting to existing threats.

One thing I'm aware of from my own homestead is that our ducks and geese that are hatched and raised by "real moms," (in our case, we have to use Muscovy moms, as our Khaki Campbell ducks and our largely Emden geese, have had mothering bred out of them to a large extent) are safer out loose for at least short periods. I would need a *much* better set-up of paddock areas with good hidey holes and plant cover to go further, as our aerial predator pressure is significant.

I have not read the book, but I am suspicious that Livestock Guardian Dogs might also be an important factor, however, the chickens my friend saw and the ones I saw were independent of that protection also. They were in a climate that likely provided them with good access to wild food year-round.

I have chickens for two primary reasons, making soil (compost) and for eggs.  It seems to me that this would negate both of those things.  

Jay Angler wrote:

I have not read the book, but I am suspicious that Livestock Guardian Dogs might also be an important factor, however, the chickens my friend saw and the ones I saw were independent of that protection also. They were in a climate that likely provided them with good access to wild food year-round.

Jay, it is funny you mentioned this. He says, for some reason, his dog does not mind eagles. He said he has watched his dog, watch an eagle eat a chicken 30 yards away and continued to lay on the ground.

Trace Oswald wrote:I have chickens for two primary reasons, making soil (compost) and for eggs.  It seems to me that this would negate both of those things.  

Trace, he goes through some historical instances of coop chickens and their demise.

I believe his premise would be; what happens when you can't get store bought feed anymore and have to open the coop for the chickens to get some of their diet themselves.