The Winter Flock Journal

What's inside

Three parts. Read whichever one the trouble finds you in.

Part One is for the morning you catch her looking wrong and don't yet know why. Part Two is for the long stretch between emergencies, where most of what keeps a flock alive actually gets decided. Part Three follows the year itself.

Part One

The Bird In Front of You

Eight chapters · pages 7–55

1The Ten-Minute Look
2The Crop
3Weight and the Breastbone
4The Droppings
5Breathing and the Head
6Legs, Feet, Skin and Feather
7One Bird or the Whole Flock
8When to Stop

Part Two

Feeding Them Off the Place

Eight chapters · pages 56–112

9What a Hen Actually Needs
10Sprouts and Green Trays
11The Summer Harvest
12Weeds and Greens Worth Cutting
13Protein Without the Bag
14Grit, Shell and Water
15Moving Them Over Ground
16What This Actually Saves

Part Three

The Year

Twelve chapters · pages 113–172

17January — the hard middle
18February — the turn of the light
19March — coming back into lay
20April — the ground opens
21May — grass, and what it changes
22June — the easy month
23July — heat, and the harvest starts
24August — putting feed by
25September — the moult
26October — before the frost
27November — shut in
28December — the dark

Lars Haugen outside the barn at Nordgard, holding one of his hens

Who wrote it

I am not a vet. I am the second man to write in this notebook.

My name is Lars Haugen. I am sixty-three, and I keep twenty-two hens on a hillside farm called Nordgard, in a valley called Drivdalen, in the middle of Norway — eighteen kilometres from the nearest town and forty-five from the nearest vet.

I am not a specialist, and I am not certified in anything a shop would want printed on a bag. What I am is the second man to write in a notebook my grandfather Halvor started in 1948. This book is what is in it, in plain terms, so that you do not have to lose the birds I lost finding it out.

You don't need any of that to use it. You need ten minutes, a bird in front of you, and the patience to look at her in the right order before you reach for anything on a shelf. Everything else — the valley, the notebook, the cold — is only where I learned it.

The bird in front of you is where you will learn it too.

A page from it

Chapter one, in full — so you know what the rest reads like.

Part One · Chapter 1Page 8

The Ten-Minute Look

Tear this page out. Put it in a freezer bag with a nail through the corner and hang it inside the coop door. It is no use to you in a drawer.

Before you touch her. Stand still at the door for one minute by the clock. Don't go in. Watch who moves and who doesn't. A hen who is standing apart with her feathers up and her eyes half shut has already told you more than anything you will find with your hands. Note which bird.

Then pick her up. Work top to bottom, in this order, every time. The order matters more than the speed. If you jump around you will find the loud thing and miss the quiet one.

Head. Comb and wattles — bright, pale, blue-grey, dark at the tips? Eyes open and clear, both the same? Put her beak an inch from your ear and listen for ten seconds. A click or a rattle at the end of the breath is not the same as a sneeze in a dusty coop.
Crop. Right side of the breast, low, under the feathers. Cup it in your palm.
- Full and soft in the evening — normal.
- Full and soft in the morning, before she's eaten — not normal.
- Hard like a bag of gravel — note it.
- Slack and swinging, like a water balloon with the air let out — note it.
One reading tells you nothing. Two readings twelve hours apart tell you almost everything.
Breastbone. Run your first two fingers down the keel. You are not looking. You are feeling — feathers lie to your eyes. A hen can lose a third of herself under full feather and look fine at twenty feet. This is the check most people skip, and the one that has told me the most in forty winters.

The chapter runs to page 16 from here — abdomen, legs and feet, skin and feather, and what to write down before you put her back.

Before you spend the money

What this book does, and what it doesn't.

It will

Give you an order to check a bird in, so you stop guessing
Show you what a hen actually needs, and what she doesn't
Cut what you buy in a bag, using ground you already have
Tell you plainly when the answer is to buy nothing at all
Tell you when to stop, and when to call someone

It won't

Replace a vet. Where a bird's life is at risk, call one
Give you drug names or doses — that is not my trade
Promise you a number of eggs. No honest book can
Work unchanged in every climate. Mine is a cold one
Sell you a supplement. I don't have one to sell

Get the Journal

One payment. Yours to keep and to print.

To mark the recent launch, the journal is currently offered at $39 instead of the regular $120.

The Winter Flock Journal — 201 pages, 28 chaptersIncluded
The Ten-Minute Look — one printed page for the coop doorIncluded
The Feed Table — what to give, and how muchIncluded
Halvor's Pages — the notebook entries, transcribedIncluded
The Year on One Page — the whole calendar at a glanceIncluded
Words, Without the Latin — plain-English glossaryIncluded
Every future revision of the bookFree

Regularly $120$39Recent launch offer · one payment

Recent launch offer for new readers · instant PDF download · read or print on any device · no account, no subscription

Get the Journal · $39

Secure checkout · Visa · Mastercard · PayPal · Apple Pay

Seven days, and you keep the file.

If it isn't what you hoped, send one email inside seven days and the full price comes back. No forms and no questions — and the book stays on your device either way.

Before you buy

Questions people ask first.

I've only got four or five hens. Is this too much book?

No — Part One is the same whether you keep four birds or forty, because it is about one bird at a time. Part Two will save you less than it saves a bigger flock, simply because you are buying less feed to begin with. If you have a few hens and they are laying well, you may not need anything in here yet, and I'd rather say so.

I'm not in Norway. Does any of it apply?

Most of it. A bird's body is the same in Tennessee as it is in Drivdalen, and so is the order you check her in. What changes is the calendar: my winter starts in October and runs to April. Part Three is written by month, so shift it to fit your own frost dates — the book says where that matters.

Is this veterinary advice?

No, and it says so on the copyright page. This is what I do on my own farm, in my own climate, written down. It gives you no drug names and no doses, because that is not my trade. Where a bird's life is at risk, call a vet.

What do I actually receive?

A 201-page PDF, delivered by download link straight after payment. The appendices — the ten-minute look, the feed table, Halvor's pages, the year on one page, the glossary — are bound inside it. It prints cleanly on standard letter paper, in full or a page at a time. No app, no account, no subscription.

I'm not much good with computers.

If you can open an email, you can open this. You get a link, you tap it, and the book is on your phone or tablet to read whenever you like. Nothing to install. If you get stuck, one email and we'll walk you through it.

Couldn't I find this free on the internet?

Pieces of it, scattered, and much of it repeated from site to site until nobody knows where it came from. What you're paying for is the order it's put in and the fact that one person stands behind all of it — including the parts where the honest answer is that there is nothing to be done and nothing to be bought.

What if it isn't for me?

Seven days, full refund, one email — and you keep the file.

Forty winters of keeping hens, written down.