Recent content by SheppFamilyFlock

I'm so glad your bird is on the mend. Thanks for sharing your experience. I have the chick in its own cage, and I've given it a b complex supplement in its water. It's not doing the splits yet, I am very hopeful I caught it early enough! We spent some time snuggling earlier, and I am encouraging...

Ok gotcha. Since I got the birds from another backyard keeper it wasn't an option. We considered ordering from a hatchery but didn't need 30 birds and didn't have room for so many! I'm hopeful it's not Marek's, and have started looking for how to get the vaccine to administer myself. Thanks for...

I cannot figure out how to attach a video 🤦‍♀️ sorry

I went out to let my birds out this morning and noticed one chick walking on its hocks. I usually spend a good amount of time in the mornings watching everyone to make sure they're all good, and today was the first time I noticed this. I tried to take a video but couldn't get one, I can keep...

I have 3 chickens that are just about a year old. We got a batch of 8 chicks last summer, 6 were roos and 2 were hens. We kept one roo and processed the rest. It's been going fine until the past few weeks, one of my poor girls has lost almost all her feathers on her back. He seems to only like...

Update: I brought them back out after posting this. The heat lamp is on and under it felt warm enough. I'm going to leave this post up because I'm curious for others' input. I definitely panicked when I brought them inside, but if I'd known the power would be back on in an hour I would have...

I live in Northern Alberta Canada and we are experiencing some pretty cold temps right now. It's our first winter on our homestead, and only our second winter in the north, so we are new to this. Our 3 birds have a heated mat, and when temps started approaching -30°C (and now -40) we added a...

Update: I ate the soup, it had a slight metallic taste which was probably just in my head. The broth was darker than normal which was what was putting me off so much I think. I added some cayenne and ate it up 🤣 thanks for all your reassurance!

Ok I didn't notice anything green. Would it stay green after being cooked?

Ok I'm being dramatic, I know I won't die. My husband and I are new to chickens and when we processed one of our birds we seem to have left a few organs behind. I didn't notice until I was straining the bones out of the soup broth. I'm grossed out and afraid to try the soup now as I've read...

I'm not concerned about the crowing, our chickens are far enough away from the house that it won't be an issue 😊 space isn't an issue either, their coop and run are plenty big enough. We only wanted about 8 chickens total. We will be processing them for meat. We are aware their meat isn't as...

Yes I do know roosters are problematic, originally we weren't going to keep any roosters but we thought we might be able to keep one so that we can hatch our own eggs. But we were also hoping to get more than 2 hens out of this batch 🙃 Is ordering chicks safer than buying laying hens? We want...

I'll just start off saying I am quite new to keeping chickens. My family has a small flock of eight birds, they are just about 12 weeks old. We've come to the realization that we likely have 6 cockerels and 2 pullets on our hands 🤦‍♀️ we will be removing 5 of the cockerels once we know for sure...

Ok that makes sense. Muffs are the feathers on the sides of the face, is that right?

Can you explain why you think they're all cockerels? Just want to learn what to look for 😊 And Easter Eggers is interesting. I looked at some photos of day old chicks when they were still very little, the black ones looked like copper Marans and the other ones I had no idea haha