I'm probably worrying about nothing, and this is probably perfectly normal. But still.
I have a couple of birds hatched about the beginning of June, making them 16 to 18 weeks old. Today I finally got them standing on the scales without much drama. They both came out at about 1500g (3.3lb)...
The first few nights we had the chickens, they wanted to pile in the corner instead of going into the little prefab box coop. I didn't want them sleeping on top of their own droppings, so I made them go in the coop to roost. Since then there have been a few modifications to the run/coop, the...
Why is this normal in chickens? I've never heard of it in any other animal, and when I google 'intestinal shedding in [non-chicken animal]' I get non-specific health info. It's only 'intestinal shedding in chickens' that brings up repeated assurances that sloughing intestinal lining is normal.
I'd like to be able to feel their crops at the end of the day, but since this is the first night they've walked into the coop instead of having to be picked up and placed there I don't want to poke at them just as they've settled down. Do I need to reach in between their feathers and the roost...
They're seven weeks old and rather scruffy-looking. I assume the disheveled teenager look is normal?
My mum named them. She commented that the long-tailed one looked perky, and that was it from there. Perky appears to be the dominant hen for now.
We got them back at about 4pm, and for...
Okay, the ingredient lists alone are going to make this a long post...
I've been wandering around and pricing up potential food bags. There is the obvious option of chicken feed, but even the smaller -- and much more expensive per kilo -- bag is 5kg. We're only getting two birds for now and...
Ah, the joys of having a blank canvas... At least with the coop & run prefab setups you don't have to worry about this.
Now that the area of the run has been finalised, I can start thinking about what to put in it and where. I plan to have as much as possible off the floor, so that the full...
Hi all.
I'm currently on the hunt for as much 'compost brown' as I can get my hands on. The ivy I've already shredded (for air removal if nothing else) has been sitting in a pile in a sheltered area for several months. Mostly it's bone-dry hairy stems of a few millimetres to a centimetre or...
Any opening large enough to allow a chicken through is quite likely to be large enough for a fox. On the other hand, a chicken is much less long in the body than a fox. If I were to take a bunch of PVC pipes and arrange them in a series of U-bends, would there be a point at which the chicken...
By 'wild' ACV, I mean old rainwater and apple cores left in a warmish darkish place. No mother, no vinegar, no cider. It's been a week and a half and the mixture smells like spilt booze on a hot day and has yellowish bubbles sitting under the surface, so I think it's working. Is it working? The...
I've been seeing several comments on how easy it is to pull hardware cloth away from wood when the cloth is on the outside of the structure and held in by staples*. So I had the idea of extending the edge of the hardware cloth a little, wrapping it around the wood, and stapling it from the back...