Arizona Chickens

[pdx2phx]

I absolutely can't stop watching this commercial...a car commercial with chickens and no car. Gotta love it!!!

You do need to have a little volume to get the full experience!

 

[enola]

SO NEAT! !

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

Quote:
Might possibly be a pea comb. Can't really tell due to the angle of the photo. The bird looks like an Easter Egger cockerel. It's definitely not silver laced.

 

[flower]

Might possibly be a pea comb. Can't really tell due to the angle of the photo. The bird looks like an Easter Egger cockerel. It's definitely not silver laced.

I agree, you are correct. I did not enlarge the photo therefore did not take a good look. Definetly an EE cockerel

 

[LadyKotaDoria]

Pdx2: you got it. Some one has chickens, you have to have them and love them to know how to use them. Soooooooo coooooool.

 

[heidisue]

That commercial is cute!

 

[Twinklin]

One of the chicken sites I follow on Facebook posted that commercial video the other day. I've watched it and shared it so many times since. It's super cute.

 

[kpgoldstar]

Thanks everyone for the very warm welcome! I appreciate all the tips for keeping my future hens protected from the summer heat. Twinklin, LindaMurphy, Featherpugs, AliciaSimon and HeidiSue - I think I got all your names right! We are planning to incorporate fans and misters as well as blocks of ice and frozen water bottles. My chickens will have a well ventilated coop with a small run, and will free range on my lawn, in my garden and the rest of the backyard in the evenings when I am home and on the weekends. The coop we will place behind a fence that divides the backyard and has shade all afternoon. I only plan to have 4. We don't have to worry so much about predators, we see the occasional hawk and one actually tried to catch a baby dove that had hatched in my tiki bar just about a month ago. We have coyotes but our yard is enclosed by block wall, 5-6 ft tall. I know they have been known to jump walls to catch small pets, but I had a chihuahua for 12 years and always felt she was safe.
What do most of you use for bedding and nesting boxes? Straw, sawdust, pine shavings? Anyone use the deep litter method for your run? I haven't decided if my run will be dressed or left bare ground. I 've done lots of reading and research and will continue to. We are visiting our 2 small feed stores over the weekend to see what is readily available locally, and what items we'll need to purchase out of town or online. We are headed to the big city (PHX) next week and plan to stop at Pratt's in Glendale which is probably where we will buy our chicks as most mail order hatcheries have a 15 chick minimum.
We need to plan our brooder and get the heat lap, feed and supplies for the chicks. I think that is all I have today!!
Kristine
Oh, and working on my profile today too!

 

[MandyFitch]

Well I still have some EE pullets for sale and got three pretty eggs from their pen today; just wish the camera would actually show the real color; these are more turquoise green than the pic shows {wow that was amazing! The spell checker is finally working!{|} City Farms are those girls laying for you yet? Looking at how pink the combs are I am thinking that the girls that came from a true blue egg will probably be the last to lay.

 

[Twinklin]

Thanks everyone for the very warm welcome! I appreciate all the tips for keeping my future hens protected from the summer heat. Twinklin, LindaMurphy, Featherpugs, AliciaSimon and HeidiSue - I think I got all your names right! We are planning to incorporate fans and misters as well as blocks of ice and frozen water bottles. My chickens will have a well ventilated coop with a small run, and will free range on my lawn, in my garden and the rest of the backyard in the evenings when I am home and on the weekends. The coop we will place behind a fence that divides the backyard and has shade all afternoon. I only plan to have 4. We don't have to worry so much about predators, we see the occasional hawk and one actually tried to catch a baby dove that had hatched in my tiki bar just about a month ago. We have coyotes but our yard is enclosed by block wall, 5-6 ft tall. I know they have been known to jump walls to catch small pets, but I had a chihuahua for 12 years and always felt she was safe.
What do most of you use for bedding and nesting boxes? Straw, sawdust, pine shavings? Anyone use the deep litter method for your run? I haven't decided if my run will be dressed or left bare ground. I 've done lots of reading and research and will continue to. We are visiting our 2 small feed stores over the weekend to see what is readily available locally, and what items we'll need to purchase out of town or online. We are headed to the big city (PHX) next week and plan to stop at Pratt's in Glendale which is probably where we will buy our chicks as most mail order hatcheries have a 15 chick minimum.
We need to plan our brooder and get the heat lap, feed and supplies for the chicks. I think that is all I have today!!
Kristine
Oh, and working on my profile today too!

We live in a residential neighborhood and have seen coyotes in the early morning and I have heard them in the middle of the night but have never seen one in our yard. I have been paranoid about them since we decided to get chickens so I made sure the coop and run are pretty predator proof. I originally planned for the girls to stay in the run all day so I made a 12" skirt around the bottom of the run that something would have to dig around to get under and into the run. There is a plywood door to close the girls in the coop at night so something would have to dig all the way under the run and then bash in the plywood door in order to get into the coop. We also have that 5-6ft block wall all around our property which I think helps with intruders. Our neighbors have told us they've seen a hawk try to get a small dog in our neighborhood a couple years back but now that the chickens free range all day they are usually in the shade under the bushes so hopefully we'll never have an issue. The run is now only for when we go out during the day for a few hours. We never let the chickens be in the run at night, if they were we'd have used a smaller sized hardware cloth. I think our current set up is plenty secure for our situation and location.

We currently use sand as litter in both the run and coop. I love it. I'll never use anything else. If the girls were confined to the run during the day I'd have a few more inches in there so they could dust bathe but since they free range and I built them their own climbing tree dust bath area in the yard I only have about an inch of sand in the run and where their food is it's bare ground so I can sweep it easier at night to keep the rats away. Inside the coop we have a few inches of sand and I scoop it like a cat litter box every other day. It so easy and keeps the run really clean. The sand also stays nice and cool as long as you keep some shade over it. We used the rough construction sand, not the kids play sand.

In the nest boxes we're using pine shavings because we had a lot left over from the brooder boxes. When we run out I think I'm going to switch to straw because it may rake up easier when they kick it out of the box.