Last year, I summed up all of the chicken experiments I'd been posting about throughout the year on our Avian Aqua Miser site, and I thought you might enjoy seeing the highlights again this year. 

One of the most timely experiments I wanted to mention involved letting our chickens free range in the woods over the winter.  I was fascinated to see that the flock concentrated most of their attention around the bases of big trees, where they scratched through the mulch in search of invertebrates.  They only foraged over about three quarters of an acre, probably because the flock had to stay close enough to the hen house so that ladies could drop by at intervals to lay their eggs.

The forest worked as a good escape valve in the summer too, when the grasses stopped growing and the ground began to look bare in their rotational pastures.  I think this system really depends on a quality rooster, though, since when I tried the same trick with some half-grown broilers, they just sat on the other side of the pasture fence and begged to be let back into their home turf.

If you start young chicks free ranging from week one and keep them close to the house, they're the very best chickens to let run semi-wild.  Having trees or bushes available to hide in makes chicks (and adult hens, for that matter) feel safer, so they spend more time hunting wild food.

There are reasons we don't let our main flock free range all the time, though.  The book Free-Range Chicken Gardens gives some tips for helping chickens coexist with a garden during the growing season, but we like to keep the garden extremely productive, so the chickens get relegated to pastures after they reach two months old.  We were forced to clip a couple of chickens' wings (and then eat one of them) when they didn't toe the line and thought the garden was still fair game during the summer months.

I don't feel like we have much more experimenting to do with free range chickens.  Our system just works!