Silver Laced Wyandotte gender?

[lauranickerson]

All of the barred birds ended up being roosters. All crowing. :/ They were black sex links so that explains is (I didn't read about them before jumping in and buying them. Didn't know you could sex them by sight). The Red in the photo is also a male. The one you weren't sure about is a female.

If this SLW ends up being male, I'll probably still keep him instead of a different one I picked (probably get rid of my favorite BSL roo

). I know SLW are beefy, which would be nice to have so I can hatch some meat birds. My Red I'm keeping isn't all that fat, but he's pretty.


Also, where do you find this magical kelp? Could I just mix it in my feed? What if I ferment my feed? What percent in the ration?

 

[chooks4life]

All of the barred birds ended up being roosters. All crowing. :/

Very strange they would reach the point of crowing without a single mature rooster feather showing! Except those two in one's tail... Hens can crow, especially the layer types, they seem to have higher testosterone. Also they can grow perfect spurs too. But I'd guess yours aren't hens, just slow-feathering roosters. Don't think I've ever seen a male that age without his rooster feathering. I wouldn't be too surprised if one of your roosters laid an egg, lol.

Kelp can be bought from basically any animal produce store or feedbarn here, but I gather they're different in america. It's just seaweed, but a very nutritionally complete one, and you can buy it granulated or powdered. Here it costs $6 a kilo, but that kilo will last me a very long time, since you only give a pinch per bird per day roughly. I used it in fermented feed and in normal feed.

It took about the third generation to start showing the best results, but it makes an immediate impact too. They sell it in human's health food stores too. It's also great for humans. If you have a baby with down's syndrome and raise them with kelp in their food, they look and usually act normal. It can recover grey hair to its original color and it raises everything's IQ. That's just the value of full nutrition in action.

I had to switch from making their feeds up to giving them premixed feed with pellets when I moved house recently, and stopped giving kelp because I was worried about mixing it into supplemented feed lest I overdose them on anything... I shouldn't have worried, I think; they all suffered, went downhill, healthwise when deprived of kelp. Not good. I'm itching to get them back when I've got a place to live... I'm living with a relative now, and it sucks, living in suburbia. At least they're on organic pellets now, and organic grains. They were just on proprietary vegetarian pellet and grain mix, which didn't do them much good at all. I started experiencing the normal health issues I'd never seen before, despite keeping so many chooks for so long.

I didn't know the full value of kelp until I stopped giving it to them.

 

[lauranickerson]

Very strange they would reach the point of crowing without a single mature rooster feather showing! Except those two in one's tail... Hens can crow, especially the layer types, they seem to have higher testosterone. Also they can grow perfect spurs too. But I'd guess yours aren't hens, just slow-feathering roosters. Don't think I've ever seen a male that age without his rooster feathering. I wouldn't be too surprised if one of your roosters laid an egg, lol.

Kelp can be bought from basically any animal produce store or feedbarn here, but I gather they're different in america. It's just seaweed, but a very nutritionally complete one, and you can buy it granulated or powdered. Here it costs $6 a kilo, but that kilo will last me a very long time, since you only give a pinch per bird per day roughly. I used it in fermented feed and in normal feed.

It took about the third generation to start showing the best results, but it makes an immediate impact too. They sell it in human's health food stores too. It's also great for humans. If you have a baby with down's syndrome and raise them with kelp in their food, they look and usually act normal. It can recover grey hair to its original color and it raises everything's IQ. That's just the value of full nutrition in action.

I had to switch from making their feeds up to giving them premixed feed with pellets when I moved house recently, and stopped giving kelp because I was worried about mixing it into supplemented feed lest I overdose them on anything... I shouldn't have worried, I think; they all suffered, went downhill, healthwise when deprived of kelp. Not good. I'm itching to get them back when I've got a place to live... I'm living with a relative now, and it sucks, living in suburbia. At least they're on organic pellets now, and organic grains. They were just on proprietary vegetarian pellet and grain mix, which didn't do them much good at all. I started experiencing the normal health issues I'd never seen before, despite keeping so many chooks for so long.

I didn't know the full value of kelp until I stopped giving it to them.

I should have probably added that those pictures of the barred and reds were from sometime in May. They didn't start crowing until a few weeks ago. They look muuuch different now. When the pictures were taken, I agree, they looked like they could be hens, which I was desperately hoping for. Now their all crowing, figuring out the whole mating thing, and their hackles and saddle feathers are coming in a lot by now.

So if I'm forgetful on giving them kelp, will it make them sick or just to how they were before they had it. I'd hate to make them sick if I forgot or went on vacation and the chicken-sitter didn't remember, etc. Sounds amazing, though. I'd like to try it.

 

[lauranickerson]

Just uploaded this video off my phone from the other day. Don't know why the quality got so bad when I uploaded it, but yeah. There's a couple dudes.

 

[chooks4life]

So if I'm forgetful on giving them kelp, will it make them sick or just to how they were before they had it. I'd hate to make them sick if I forgot or went on vacation and the chicken-sitter didn't remember, etc. Sounds amazing, though. I'd like to try it.

No, it won't make them sick, you'd have to force feed them huge amounts to poison them, like you can do with any multivit or mineral. There's room for error, but a huge over or under dose will generally produce the same symptoms. It's like any other multivitamin or mineral, best had in natural form in small amounts daily.

 

[lauranickerson]

No, it won't make them sick, you'd have to force feed them huge amounts to poison them, like you can do with any multivit or mineral. There's room for error, but a huge over or under dose will generally produce the same symptoms. It's like any other multivitamin or mineral, best had in natural form in small amounts daily.

I'm just worries that if I were to forget giving it to them one day or two that it'd make them sick. I don't want to hurt the poor things.

 

[chooks4life]

That's good, you're right to have concern and seek the facts. It's a sure sign of a responsible steward. I don't recommend any dietary additions or subtractions that I've not used myself for many generations, and I'm very aware I'm as fallible and unlearned as the next home poultry keeper. If I'm not sure of something I'll give warning, I would hate to have helped someone into a failure of some kind or another.

It's always best to do your own research, bearing in mind that most of what you see will reflect the vested agendas of those in power who profit from the current situation... And the power they have to skew studies or suppress info in their favor... Lol, I'm just not a fan of commercial industry interfering with information on health. When its profits come from sub-health or outright disease, you can't expect them to recommend anything truly successful at eradicating disease. It's taken a long time for medical studies to begin to admit that garlic is more powerful than even their most powerful man made antibiotics in many areas.

So much has been 'pooh-pooh'd' and dismissed as old wives' tales etc when it was actually valid. We've been taught a bunch of pseudo science (mixed in with truth) that gained popularity in the wild-west-style heyday of basically unregulated science. During those times any company could hire any so-called scientist to make studies proving whatever they wanted, and lots of that misinformation is still believed to be true. If you read their studies' criteria and controls, it's a bad joke of which most people only heard the punchline. At least now real science and real medicine is starting to regain a voice and supporters, regardless of who's getting funded by who.

Recently studies in Australia (of all backwards retarded places) have come out on the mainstream news admitting raw garlic can kill food poisoning bacteria etc that extremely strong man made antibiotics can't. Now I look slightly less crazy for my claims that raw garlic fed to chooks equals a complete survival rate against coccidiosis. You just won't ever lose a chook to it while feeding raw garlic. But as someone's sig line says... (I forget who)... Much easier to start natural than start mainstream and try to switch.

Anyway, best wishes with you and yours, hope you find what works for you. At the end of the day I'm pretty sure we're all just doing out best with what we know/believe/have/etc.

 

[lauranickerson]

Wow, yeah, that's eye opening. I feel the same way about the medicine industry as well. Why would a car company tell you how to fix your car yourself when it will just take away their business. Same thing! It can be frustrating.

I fed my flock raw garlic a few times. I might start doing it again. Tonight while watching the flock before they went in, one of the roosters used the bathroom, but it looked like pee, which they don't pee. I've been seeing this kind of thing for a while now on and off. Their roost poo looks normal, but every once in a while, it looks they pee, or if you know how it looks like when a duck poos, it's like that.

Sorry for the visuals. Lol.

So yeah, maybe I'll try the garlic again and some AVC in their water more often. I'll definitely look into kelp. I was actually reading about pesticides today and kelp came up as a fertilizer for plants. Must be good for just about everything!

 

[chooks4life]

Yes, kelp's a very valuable plant. There are some islands which were basically rocky outcrops which people managed to turn into lush pastures and forests over the years by harvesting kelp and digging it into the very shallow soil that already existed there. Now they've got deep, healthy soil and grow everything they need, supporting themselves and livestock.

Sounds like you're describing watery diarrhea? That can be symptomatic of many things, but generally not good. Unless it's been hot and they've been drinking more than they need to cool down, in which case they may do watery poops. In that case it's fine.

Garlics's useful for many things but you get the best benefit from feeding it basically as a staple part of their diet, raw. Garlic is high in sulfur, and if fed continuously this sulfur builds up in their tissues and bloodstream and they become very distasteful, toxic even, to internal and external parasites, as well as making the chook an inhospitable environment for bad bacteria, microorganisms, viruses, etc. It won't harm the chook, and you won't taste it in their flesh or eggs, from my experience, but some people swear you can taste it in the eggs.

The overblown list of toxic plants that I keep encountering (which always seems to include garlic) was obtained in large part by force-feeding animals in 'scientific' studies only the plants being tested, and nothing or very little else, under which circumstances any creature will die. Too much water or oxygen is also fatal for us, lol! They didn't differentiate between the animal dying from malnutrition due to the unbalanced diet, and dying from the plant in question. But those studies are still used to frighten poultry keepers into going by the textbook and buying what medications they're told to. Oregano is another potent antibiotic, among other uses, and rosemary is a great all round helpful plant. But many modern breeds of plants are bred ornamentally and have lost some potency. However since oregano's been cutivated for culinary use instead of flower appearance like rosemary (as far as I know) you could try giving a pinch per chook to them in their feed to see if it helps.

Medical, agricultural and pharmaceutical research into sulfur compounds for various uses including healing and pest control was triggered by findings from research into the reasons why garlic was efficient for the same purposes. These artificial sulfur compounds are harmful though, and aren't processed by the body or the soil like natural sulfur. They dismissed garlic in the media as an old wives' tale, to drive people to buy their version sulfur and antibiotics, but worldwide it is still used to treat many things, and in Russia it's called 'russian penicillin'. It's also known as 'the poor man's antibiotic'.

Once it's just been crushed or cut, a compound forms named Allicin, among 30-something others already there, formed from the enzyme reaction. This is a powerful antibiotic which is always unique in makeup so bacteria and viruses can't develop immunity to it like they can to a stable, man-made antibiotic that never changes. I recently caught a virus that killed a few other people, it was a combination of a viral, bacterial and fungal infection; I had a fever for two days straight and became a skeleton. When I recovered I noticed the lung infection remained, and grew stonger, and I knew because of the way it sounded that it was drowning air pockets in my lungs and could still kill me. I crushed and ate one clove of garlic raw and the infection was dead within 15 minutes and my body could finally cough it out. I've nearly died from lung infections before so I recognize the warning signs of something taking over. I wouldn't have expected one clove of garlic to act so quickly, but it's worth remembering, it can save your life. Other people with this infection, which targeted those supposedly in their prime rather than the old or very young, ended up in comas and many died in hospital.

 

[lauranickerson]

I've always believed garlic has magical healing powers! I love it! So even if the eggs tasted like it, I wouldn't mind. It would save me from putting it in my eggs like I do anyways.

Well, it was very hot today (about 90). Today, seeing that, was about the wateriest I've seen it yet. It seemed to all start when I was cranking out the fermented feed, then changed to finisher crumbles in the mix, and it didn't act the same. It got a film of spores on top, which I though was maybe the mother at first, so I mixed it in. I don't think that's what it was. It didn't really look like mold either, but it didn't seem right. That seems like the turning point on when they starting having diarrhea. Maybe it wasn't even from that...it could have just been all the water in the feed? Again, their roost poos are completely normal, with a white cap on top. It seemed to happen after eating and for a few hours after. It started about a month or so ago. They all act 100% fine, don't have lice or mites, have clean nostrils, crops feel normal.

I'm kind of stumped. Maybe it's nothing more than the wet feed (like the thickness of chunky soup. Runny enough I can swish it around)