Recent content by LeadHead

We're in Northern Illinois. The weather has not been particularly hot the last few days--in the 80's or so--though the humidity has been somewhat high. It gets down to around 68 at night. The barn where we have our coops is built on a concrete slab and we use straw for bedding. We have our...

Should have mentioned that we were raising the turkeys on Purina Startena 28% game bird starter. Our one remaining chicken chick seems to be doing fine, at least at this point.

About 2 months ago we ordered 10 turkey poults and about 40 layer chicks. A week later, in less than 24 hours we lost all but one of the chicks, 5 of the turkeys and three 3-4 month-old Plymouth Rocks due to a plague of gnats that hit our area. We brought the one remaining chick and 5...

I don't think it's necessarily an issue of not letting them out of the coop, Shauntel. In fact, letting the chickens out can actually benefit them because it allows them to dust bathe and find dark places to escape from the insects. The life cycle of these gnats is several weeks, so hopefully...

Western Illinois, in the upper 1/3 of the state.

We learned the hard way just yesterday that gnats are very deadly. Within 24 hours we lost 5 one-week-old turkey poults, almost 40 five-day-old chicks and 3 three-month-old Plymouth Rocks. We were gone during the day and when I went to check on them in the evening I found dead and dying birds...

I have 2 Silky hens for brooding purposes. They both recently began brooding some of their own eggs immediately next to each other in the straw on the floor of the coop (forget nesting boxes!). As is common, if one gets up to go eat/drink/stretch her legs, the other steals her eggs and...

I'm thinking maybe because they don't have a solid floor in their cage the cold is what got them. The multiple deaths in one night, all of them in such a cage...

Yes, I could do that if I knew what to look for. Also, it would indeed be possible for some of their waste to have gotten into their water.

Pardon my ignorance here, but isn't coccidiosis normally transmitted via feces? If so, wouldn't this be less likely since they are in an elevated cage with 1/2" hardware cloth bottom? As a result, they should have a minimum of feces to deal with and it would seem that the broilers down below...

My son called me while on my way to work this morning. He had gone out to feed the chickens and found several young Silkies (5 of 7) and our d'uccle hen dead in their cage, and the d'uccle rooster "a bit wobbly". The d'uccle hen was a couple years old, the Silkies were a few months old. We...

Well, we candled the eggs over the weekend and out of 13 eggs 9 are definitely viable and possibly the 10th. So, hopefully we'll have some new babies a week from tomorrow. Just curious--how many Silky eggs can one hen reliably brood at one time? She originally had 17 but we removed 4 because...

One other thing; we have the one broody hen and her roo caged together (about 6 square feet). Will it be ok to leave him with her after they hatch, or will he try to kill the chicks? There was a dog incident a few days ago and we tragically lost our 2nd hen, so it's just the 2 of them now.

Not too long ago we were blessed by a neighbor who gave us a couple Silky hens and a rooster. We decided to hatch some out, so we let one of the hens go broody and she's now been on the eggs about 10 days. My question is whether or not I should candle the eggs. We have no idea how fertile the...

Just got this one this morning either from a Black Australorp or a red sex link. It looks sorta like a tree that has lost a branch and healed over. Too bad all eggs aren't like this, because then you could lay them on the counter and they wouldn't roll off on the floor!