Haha yeah, I gotcha... I'm definitely not scared a little poop on the eggs (hey, they both come out of the same place), but it was just sorta gross seeing an egg on top of a big pile of it.
Great – thank y'all so much!
I imagined that blocking off the boxes and re-training them to use the roosts was the thing to do, so it's excellent reinforcement knowing that this is a common problem / solution.
While we're on the topic, is there anything y'all would recommend for cleaning...
Hello!
I've got two hens that are happy and healthy, but due to the cold weather and despite the fact that I've got the coop well covered, they've taken to sleeping (and pooping, ugh) in their laying boxes instead of roosting. Naturally I don't want to eat their eggs when I go to collect them...
Hello everyone!
We've been getting some pretty brutal heat in Austin this summer as usual. I've got a small sprinkler that I turn on low for a little while each afternoon so that my hens can enjoy some flowing water and peck around in the mud puddle. With the extra heat, however, I've been...
Update: when I went out to feed my hens this evening, it was exactly the same case. She was in the box, making the angry sound. I refilled their food and water, and then just to test and see what happened, I opened the egg collection hatch and, despite her puffing up and protesting, I could...
I just looked on here for this exact question... my Barred Rock is broody, I think. She used to be the liveliest of my hens (I have three), always chasing me around in the hopes that it was feeding time. Now she just sits in the egg box all the time and makes that crazy dinosaur (Jurassic Park...
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I noticed twice this week that some of my eggs (I have three layers) had splotches of orange-y stuff on the outside. It was slightly sticky- the shavings stuck to it. I know that sometimes you'll get a little poop on the eggs, but this is something I've never seen before. Does this sound...
I have a quick fix question. I live in Austin and we're about to get a big cold snap tomorrow, just for a night. I think it might get down to 36 at the lowest. I know this is above freezing, but is there anything special I should do? I wasn't expecting this, and being such short notice at all, I...
Thanks, that's what I expected. Since she seems perky and happy, I figured it'd just take a couple of days for her to get back into her routine and adjust to the new feed.
It's Coyote Creek Feed Mill Organic, and it's marked as layer feed. I still have a smaller bit of the old feed (which was Micobe, I think), so I mixed that in with her food when I refilled the feeder today. Maybe it's just a matter of adjusting to the new stuff? We'll see.
Hello everybody-
My RIR hasn't laid eggs in a couple of days (she's usually pretty regular), and this morning I went out to find that she'd laid a sort of squishy, soft egg. It seems like the shell wasn't fully developed or something of the sort. What's more, she laid it obviously while she was...
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Since you brought that up about my barred definitely being a hen, I've got a question... at what point would I be able to tell if the buff's actualy a rooster? I really hope she's not!
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Funny you say that... it's exactly the case with mine. The barred will let me pick her up without hardly any hassle, while the buff runs around like crazy when I try to grab her and makes me have to chase her around the yard for a couple minutes. My neighbors must think I'm crazy, haha...
Well, I think I've settled it. I actually called the guy (ah, the miracle thing that is the phone, something we all forget about!) and he said that these guys are a Barred Rock and a Buff Orpington (black vs gold, respectively).
Thanks, everybody, for playing Name That Chicken!
The latter seems to be pretty much spot on! She's gold, and and a lot of the young pullet photos that popped up look almost exactly like her.
When I typed in Delaware chicken on google image search, I got a bunch of white chickens... I'm not sure if that's the right one, but barred rock seems...
Hi-
As I've said in previous posts, I recently bought one full grown RIR and two chicks. As a newbie to raising chickens, the process of buying them was a little overwhelming and, embarrassingly enough, I forgot what breeds the two chicks I bought were.
The guy I bought them from told me that...