Recent content by pelicanchook

Interestingly, my Australian chickens won't touch red cabbage, or red lettuce, but go mad for a suspended green cabbage or lettuce. I also put a skewer through a sweet corn, or zucchini (might be you call them courgettes) and suspend them and they really love them. A big bundle of straw gives...

I love reading about all your problems with roosters, which fortunately I don't have to contend with. It always makes me smile when I read what is obviously the usual abbreviation for rooster as "roo". Here in Australia, where I live, a roo is a kangaroo, which is always my first...

I have a big dormitory area for my girls, with their roosting racks about 4 feet off the concrete floor (with a ramp for them to access the racks). I put straw on the concrete floor - loads and loads of it, together with herbs, wormwood branches, fleabane - anything that adds a pleasant smell...

My goodness, what a fuss! Australian chickens must be much tougher. My girls get whatever scraps might be available, ranging from pizza (rarely any of that left over), sausages and any other meat including salami, mice caught in traps, fruit of every kind, especially water melon, but not...

In winter I add warm water to their pellets and call it porridge, and then add two eggs on top, every morning. In summer I buy tins of corn kernels (cheap) and keep them in the fridge, and then take a tin down when it starts getting hot around midday. In really hot weather (quite often 40C...

Some dogs perhaps - mine which is part labrador is perfectly fine with my chooks, but a beagle - no way, remember they are used in fox hunting, and at two years old, it will be well set in its ways. I think I'd give up that idea, or find a more effective way of constraining your chooks all the...

Hi Sage, I'm in Australia too, and I have used a portacot with great success. I let mum look after the peeps in my nursery (old dog kennel) until they were about 8 weeks old, then as she got fed up with the task, I moved them to the portacot to let them get bigger before they joined the flock...

Fantastic article - and so well explained. I shall try this out straight away because here in Australia in summer it is very hard to find good green vegetation for the chooks at a reasonable price.

Fabulous article, thank you for working out all the maths, way beyond my capabilities. I have chickens just because I like chickens - their eggs are a bonus which I usually give away to others because I just couldn't eat that many. I would absolutely NOT be able to eat any of my girls, although...

I'm really surprised to see no mention of Nite Guard solar lights, wonderful American invention as fox deterrents. I live in Australia, right on the edge of a flood plain, so plenty of foxes around. I have used the Nite Guard solar lights around my chicken coop for over 10 years now, and have...

I have been keeping chooks for 10 years now, and even though I live in a rural area, with my coop backing onto a very dry flood plain, I have never had a fox incursion into the coop. I use Night-Guards fixed around the perimeter. I first saw them on my daughter's chicken coop in LA, and...

I've never had a broody before, and let her sit on 5 eggs since she seemed determined to next despite all my efforts to discourage her. The first egg hatched on day 21, and it is now day 24 and nothing else has hatched, and she is determined to stay sitting on them. I'm in Australia, and so...

I love the pipe gravity feeder - my first ever effort at DIY and I'm very proud of the result. Wonderful clear instructions, just like a recipe. My local irrigation shop found all the required bits for me and the instructions were really easy to follow. Best of all, the girls took about 3...

such a useful lot of information, thank you so much. I recently had a problem with soft shells, and was told that shell grit (which I had been providing) was probably not giving the girls enough calcium in a form they could use, and to give them calcium carbonate (oyster shells) Oyster shells...