Insect Impact
An efficient, sustainable homestead — whether in the country or the city — makes use of surplus resources that are close at hand. And what better qualifies as a surplus resource close at hand than bugs? And what do your chickens like more than eating bugs? Nothing. So turn your outdoor — or indoor — bounty of bugs into a supplement to that organic chicken feed. You’ll make fewer trips to the feed-supply store once you have a few systems set up. Just be sure to avoid using pesticides, because you are what you eat. If your hens eat nasty chemicals in those bugs, then you could become a walking superfund site.
This means you must forgo insecticides and turn your problem into a poultry food source by spending your money on traps of various kinds instead of poisons. You’ll spend about the same amount of money and have a less toxic environment. Your fresh chicken feed will be essentially free and totally organic. Let’s look at places where this can work.
Basements
OK class. Settle down. It’s time for a Chicken Feed Café pop quiz.
Question: You’re in the basement, and you see a type of cricket often found there. Is it a cave cricket or a camel cricket?
Answer: Who cares? Chickens don’t care and neither should you!
Today’s pop quiz was a trick question: Cave crickets, camel crickets, humpback crickets and even spider crickets (aka sprickets) are all the same species: Diestrammena asynamora. They just have different common names around the country.
But no matter what you call them, they will land on your flat sticky traps and wait patiently to sacrifice themselves to the cause of feeding your favorite pets … or your second favorite pets.
These basement crickets like to go forth and multiply in areas with just enough moisture and darkness that they can find bits of fungus to eat and the remains of last year’s crickets. If that sounds like your basement, you most likely have squishy, hoppy little basement crickets as long as the basement is above freezing. So if your furnace is in the basement, you may even have bugs to feed your chickens in the depths of an otherwise bug-less winter.
I run a dehumidifier in my Carolina basement, so I rarely see these crickets .... unless I put down a sticky trap. They fill it up in a day or two. And most of them are dead by the time I check on them, probably from dehydration: They need the moisture in the fungus to survive. Then I take the trap and clip it to a binder clip on the inside of the gate to the run at about head height for the chickens. They know what they are right away, and the greediest chickens clean their plate pretty quickly. No, the sticky trap doesn’t stick to their beaks. And once it’s clean, I can put it back into the basement to snag another course of tasty bugs.
Upstairs
Everyone has to deal with pantry moths at some time. Their eggs can arrive in bags of flour and other products. There’s a triangularshaped sticky trap designed for them. We rarely catch enough of them to really make a meal for our hens. But that kind of trap is always worthwhile to have on hand to keep those guys from multiplying in your cupboards. But there’s another bug down on the floor that makes a more substantial meal for hens.
In the South, we call these little unwanted houseguests palmetto bugs. They’re about the size of a house key. You might know them as cockroaches. In parts of the country with less heat and humidity, you probably have the smaller German cockroach: They’re the same ruddy brown color but more rounded and about the size of a dime.
Don’t pretend you don’t have them. When I chat with people who clean houses for a living, I ask if they clean any homes that are free of roaches. They look around to see if a client is watching, then quickly shake their heads, “no.” Then they squint their eyes shut and give a little shudder.
I had used poison baits for them. They kept the house free of visible roaches anyway. Until I’d see one about three to four months later,
which meant it was time to swap out fresh poison. But then I decided I wanted to catch them and feed them to the chickens. I’ve accomplished this by using sticky traps in the shape of a box the size of a pack of cigarettes. I set them under sinks and behind cabinets in our kitchen, bathroom and mudroom. They also work on our front and back porches. The little paperboard traps stay out of the rain that way, but catch a lot of roaches that think they’d like to move in. You might know these simple devices as roach motels: “Roaches check in, but they can’t check out!”
The Japanese first came up with this concept in the 70s and called them Gokiburi Hoy-hoy, which means: “Hey, hey cockroaches, come over to my house.” Seriously. The original box had windows printed on the sides. And they sold as swiftly as a better mousetrap in Japan, which has much stricter rules about pesticides than the U.S. By the end of the first month on the market, 22 million packages had sold.
American companies, uh, borrowed this concept and the pheromones that attract the roaches, and they’re top sellers in this country, too. These roach motels are boxes with open ends for the critters to crawl into. When two or three roaches have been caught, flip the box over so more will be caught on what was the ceiling of the motel. There’s also a tab on the side so, like a cereal box, they can be opened flat for feeding hens once the motel is “booked up.”
In the Garden
When a friend complained of Japanese beetles attacking her garden, I suggested what many professionals do. Get six Japanese beetle traps.
Then give one to each of your closest neighbors so the beetles are drawn away from your garden. My friend saw through my humor and bought one for her garden anyway. Drowned beetles piled up in the jar full of water beneath the trap. When she offered to dump the dead beetles in our chicken run, we couldn’t refuse. They were pretty stinky, but apparently “stinky” is a chicken’s favorite flavor.
There are similar traps for houseflies. When those traps fill up, I’ve dumped them into the pen and the hens eat them up. No doubt the stinkyness of the bait — eau de rotten meat — helps the chickens overcome their normal and
probably sane, disdain for flies. Flies caught on fly tape have no appeal at all for hens. But the stinkyness of the bait for the flytraps is pretty nasty for us. And there is some reason to be concerned about diseases from eating flies, so I’ve just stuck with the fly tapes for now.
Not all sources of buggy chicken feed even require traps. In summer when you hear the droney buzz of cicadas, keep your eye out for the hollow husks they shed after erupting from the soil. Gathering them could be a perfect chore for the kids. These crispy, chitinous treats are like the best poultry potato chip; hens can’t eat just one.
The mature cicadas have a pretty short lifespan. So a few weeks after you start seeing their empty husks, you’ll notice the spark-plug-size adults lying around dead or near dead. Dead is good. The chickens will steal them right out of each others’ mouths to get a bite. But near dead is even better. Cup one in your hands or pinch a wing and fling them into the pen for an impromptu hen aerobics class — on the wing so to speak.
Frank Hyman writes about cutting edge crops for Hobby Farms magazine and is the author of the book Hentopia: Create Hassle-free Habitat for Happy Chickens; 21 Innovative Projects.