Posts by azygous

Esme is a hoot! She's adorable! Her crow reminds me of some young bantam cockerels I had thirty years ago roosting outside my bedroom window in a hedge, practicing their crowing. They sounded exactly like your Esme - kind of like...

What a grizzly, pardon the pun, story! That must have been a horror to come home to.    I'm well aware of what bears are capable of. Twenty years ago, when I first moved here, one got into my house, and the destruction...

Cos, besides an abundance of bears, I've been visited by bobcats, foxes, skunks, and every bit as bad, hawks. Once any predator gets a bead on the chickens, they keep coming back again and again until I manage to get a direct hit at...

What you're describing is normal pecking order behavior. She's teaching the chicks where their rank is in the flock, albeit in a rather over-the-top way. As long as she can't get into the pen and hurt the chicks, I wouldn't worry about...

Oh. I see that grapes left in their intact round shape could be a choking hazard, but I still don't see how the seeds could choke a chicken. Seeds are one of the things they're engineered to eat, what with their marvelous little crops...

They don't sell PDZ here. But thanks for suggesting it.

I also meant to ask if anyone has used odor removing enzymatic solutions on the soil in their run? One thing that concerns me is the foul odor I'll be creating by wetting the sand with all the microscopic dried fecal matter mixed...

I'm going to try hosing it down now that it's getting warmer here. I didn't want to add any moisture during the sub-freezing winter months because of the high risk of frost bite. It's an enclosed run, completely in winter with plastic...

Has anyone tried to wash the dust out of the sand in their run?   I like the sandy substrate and its ease in keeping clean. But it's becoming dustier as time goes by. I've developed chronic bronchitis from it, and my chickens...

I also live in Colorado. We have bears here. I have found it useful and effective to install galvanized steel hog panels over the chicken wire, with hardware cloth around the bottom.     The hardware cloth gets fanned out...