Arizona Chickens

[Mama Hen Chris]

Spent time with the girls today. Have to show off some of the pics I took. Pic heavy.

Wilma, EE, as the sun was setting.

Daphne, BO

Phoebe, CM, loves to look into the lens

and again

and hamming it up

Vincenzo, Splash Silkie

Some of the kiddos

Phoebe again

She is a good model

Josephine, EE

Daisy, BO and Roberta, SLW

Dolly, BO

Vincenzo

Clara, Welsummer

Lorenzo, BCM

 

[LadyKotaDoria]

Also, I am looking for some one good in construction. Once I get my NEW Camper I can come to you. The project is a Coop on wheels. Not a standard tractor coop. It will be designed to 1) hold 6 standard chickens 2) fit on my truck bed, 3) be able to wheel it off the bed using a ramp, return to my truck bed with a wrench. 4) be able to close in all sides so when moving and going throw weather my girls will be save, and I can control the ventilation so that they will also be safe. 5) built in feeder and water. I plan on using a pen found at a lot of pet stores. I will need to make a cover for it that I can put on it to protect my girls. When I start my travels I will be ta.king 4 of them with me. I will have to find homes for the rest. This will be very hard. It may turn out that I will have to raise my girls on the road for them to be happy with that kind of life. There is at lest 2 others that or doing it. One has a flock of 6 Buff Orrington's that free range when they park, always knows where they left their coop.

When you are ready to start ideas, come on over and we'll get it started. I'm nice and handy with all that, plus I have the tools. It should be a pretty easy project. Give me a rough idea of what you have in mind, though, in terms of dimensions and designs so I can work up a couple of drawings. The logistics for what you requested is really easy. Rather than using a winch, though, I'd recommend a couple of pulleys with a hand crank. Cheaper, easier and maintenance free. It doesn't require an electrical connection or battery, either. Set up a pulley at the front of the bed and one on the coop. Secure the end of the rope at the bed's pulley and loop it through the pulley on the coop. The rope comes back forward, though the pulley and sideways to the edge of the bed. Another pulley is mounted there that will allow the rope to curve and travel along the bed, where the hand crank is mounted at the back corner. It allows you to be at the back of the truck guiding it up the ramps, while operating the crank at the same time. Both the corner pulley and the hand crank can be mounted to short boards that fit in to the pockets built in to the bed rails of virtually all trucks.. Think of it like a gambrel and pulley for hanging deer in the field when you dress them. This would actually be an excellent and inexpensive setup for what I'm talking about and it's only $12 at Harbor Freight. See the photo below. The hand crank should run you $25 or less. Also remember, you could have a stationary one on your truck like a sleeper shell would be and just add the covered ramp when you are parked. They can come and go as they please. We can make a collapsible tractor for them while they are out. If you use door hinges rather than traditional hinges, you can pull the pins out and easily separate the panels.

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Either way, like I said, it should be easy to do. Rather than having actual "sides" that you can close, it would be cheaper, easy and lighter to use a weather proof barbecue grill cover. For ventilation, you can cut several flaps in it that velcro or zip closed for really bad weather, but roll up to open in good weather, just like a standard tent would. The cover in the photo below even has built in vents on the top and has a chicken-coop shape to it. At $25, it's cheaper than a sheet of plywood, too. There are two quick and easy designs for feed and water. Use a 2 1/2 gallon bucket with a small hole drilled in it for air supply, and then run it down through some pipes to poultry nipples, just like I did in my brooder. That amount of water should easily last a week for your four chickens, would stay clean the entire time and not spill during travels. For the feed, we can build a cheap and easy feed hopper. It fills a 4" pipe from the top and has a bowl at the bottom that only allows a certain amount of food to come out based on how full the bowl is. You control the amount of feed in the bowl by raising or lowering the vertical hopper. If you use a clean-out cap at the top, a standard canning funnel from Ball will fit in the top of the pipe tightly and allow for an easier time filling it. I would assume you could go several days in between fills.

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Just a quick sketch I threw together, this could be mobile one that pulls out if we modify it slightly for the wheel wells, or the stationary one if we modify it for the ramp, but you'll get the point. The green line at the top left is the door that would open upwards and allow you access to the nesting box that is the square in the middle-left. It could also hing upwards at the bottom of the angled section to allow storage in that top section. The three round bars are roosts, nicely situated above the nesting box. The blue cylinder on the right is the bucket of water, with lines running down for two poultry nipples. The black cylinders make the feed hopper with the bowl at the bottom. The entire front, lower section could open upwards to allow easy cleaning.

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Hope that gives you some great ideas...

Thank you, as soon as my mothers memorial is over I will take you up on that. I have not even had time to take measurements and work on some designs. My hands have been full. I spent last week end on pills for stress, they nock me out. Then the on Wednesday I started cleaning my house 5 minutes at a time, between falling a sleep. Doing only light things. Then this afternoon when I had gone 7 days I started to clean the cesspool that was my refrigerator. I had spilt food and a lot of dead things. I got everything out, inside washed, was washing shelves and drawers plus putting them back. The first time in weeks I was starting to feel human... Then my nose started to bleed. I am so bummed out. I have a bale of straw I need to get in back, weeds that took advantage of me, it looks like I am going to have to hire someone to do my job out back for my girls. Concentrating on the inside, I am a non-house keeper as it is. I did get the outside brooder set up, so I can put my chicks out side, they are so cute. I am counting on 1 pullet, that will grow up on the road to start. I think I have a the spots filled. Rosa, Voney, and Lucy to go on gage road. I want to keep Deary, but she is not calm enough. Life is such an adventure.

 

[kpgoldstar]

My 4 pullets have been laying for about 6 weeks. This is the 2nd time we have gotten a 3" long monster egg. Since I was finally able to stalk my girls last weekend I at least know that Snoop's egg is the light one on the far right. Lemon lays the really dark one next to hers. Between Leticia and Dottie I'm not sure - never caught them directly after laying. By markings of hen I would guess it is Leticia's egg that is the big one. Poor girl. Last one we got was a double yolker and I thought she would skip a day, but nope. 4 eggs from 4 hens daily for many days in a row

!

 

[LadyKotaDoria]

Oops

 

[Timskins]

Got my first broody hen. So what do you guys do to break them? What's your egg retrieval technique? She has made it clear that I am not welcome near her.

 

[rockmissjess]

Got my first broody hen.  So what do you guys do to break them?  What's your egg retrieval technique?  She has made it clear that I am not welcome near her.

Move the food and water further away from where she is laying watch closely when she gets up to drink and eat...retrieve the eggs... or get some gloves and go in under her...

 

[mclevinson]

Sooooo. Yesterday I began my foray into feeding my quail (we are moving so getting chickens again will have to wait until then. Probably) with soaked/fermented feed...and almost killed my new hatch.
It wasn't the feed, it was the process. I filled a gallon jar with feed and water, stirred in a tablespoon of live sauerkraut juice and for lack of a better spot placed the jar on the desk in the garage office next to the incubator. The bator was still happily humming away awaiting late hatches, and my 23 fuzzies were happily snuggled in a rubbermaid tote under the desk with a drip feeder and precisely positioned heat lamp at exactly 100 perfect degrees. I went to bed, self satisfied with my neat arrangement.
This morning I was up just before 6 am, DH thoughtfully snoring in replacement of my alarm clock which I do not set on Saturday. Going to make my morning coffee, I heard distressed peeps coming from the office. Thinking that the 60 watt bulb wasn't doing it's job, I popped into the office only to find 23 soaking wet, bedraggled and hyperthermic quail chicks huddled and/or sprawling in varying stages of near death - the temperature having dropped to 78 degrees.
I snatched them up and back into the incubator and then irritably uncoupled the ball bearing drip waterer and yanked it out, thinking the seal had failed and flooded the brooder tote. But it was full. Questing for an answer, my coffee deprived brain wondered if DD had dumped water in there in her insomniac wandering during the night. No, the bottle I keep for incubator humidity was there, and not depleted. And then I saw it.
The gallon jug of grain and water I had set out to ferment had taken on a life of its own. It bulged and oozed over the top of the jar, making a mushroom of the rubber banded coffee filter I had covered it with, rivulets of moisture sliding down the sides and pooling on the desk. And dripping directly into the brooder.
Now I am impatiently waiting to see if the chicks survive, and whether they will be fuzzy or will dry with their down all matted and need bathing.
The soaked grain now resides in a plastic bucket, with plenty of room for expansion.

 

[MandyFitch]

Sooooo. Yesterday I began my foray into feeding my quail (we are moving so getting chickens again will have to wait until then. Probably) with soaked/fermented feed...and almost killed my new hatch.
It wasn't the feed, it was the process. I filled a gallon jar with feed and water, stirred in a tablespoon of live sauerkraut juice and for lack of a better spot placed the jar on the desk in the garage office next to the incubator. The bator was still happily humming away awaiting late hatches, and my 23 fuzzies were happily snuggled in a rubbermaid tote under the desk with a drip feeder and precisely positioned heat lamp at exactly 100 perfect degrees. I went to bed, self satisfied with my neat arrangement.
This morning I was up just before 6 am, DH thoughtfully snoring in replacement of my alarm clock which I do not set on Saturday. Going to make my morning coffee, I heard distressed peeps coming from the office. Thinking that the 60 watt bulb wasn't doing it's job, I popped into the office only to find 23 soaking wet, bedraggled and hyperthermic quail chicks huddled and/or sprawling in varying stages of near death - the temperature having dropped to 78 degrees.
I snatched them up and back into the incubator and then irritably uncoupled the ball bearing drip waterer and yanked it out, thinking the seal had failed and flooded the brooder tote. But it was full. Questing for an answer, my coffee deprived brain wondered if DD had dumped water in there in her insomniac wandering during the night. No, the bottle I keep for incubator humidity was there, and not depleted. And then I saw it.
The gallon jug of grain and water I had set out to ferment had taken on a life of its own. It bulged and oozed over the top of the jar, making a mushroom of the rubber banded coffee filter I had covered it with, rivulets of moisture sliding down the sides and pooling on the desk. And dripping directly into the brooder.
Now I am impatiently waiting to see if the chicks survive, and whether they will be fuzzy or will dry with their down all matted and need bathing.
The soaked grain now resides in a plastic bucket, with plenty of room for expansion.

Wow. What a disaster! Hope it works out. Pictures might be fun if the story has a good ending!

 

[Gallo del Cielo]

Hey everyone...been a whirlwind of things going on. Mom passed away last week, funeral was today. Have some personal issues going on and was looking to see if any of you may know of any houses for rent that are chicken and dog friendly. I really do not want to get rid of the girls. Please pm me if you know of anything. Thanks

I'm so sorry Chris.

Your pictures of the ladies from yesterday were so beautiful too.

 

[Gallo del Cielo]

Got my first broody hen. So what do you guys do to break them? What's your egg retrieval technique? She has made it clear that I am not welcome near her.

I put them in a elevated wire cage for three days, it works like a charm. My wire cage is a dog crate that I put wire on the bottom. Be sure the cage is predator proof or enclosed in a predator proof area. Put her in it at night.