Arizona Chickens

[Twinklin]

So I'm working from home today and one of my chickens, Cadbury, is just throwing an absolute (as loud as possible) tantrum. To the point I thought the neighbors might start throwing things since it was around 8 am. I go down there tell her off, give them all some grapes and hope she quiets down. I look in the coop an Firey is in the "one and only" egg laying spot laying an egg. Cadbury was more or less screeching at her. The bribes seemed to work and I walk away hoping she'll quiet down the noise, but about few min later she starts up again. This girl doesn't even sound like a chicken. I'm not sure what she sounds like, but good golly is she loud. After another 10 min of that I go back down, open the coop, and sure enough she's still screeching at Firey. I was just done with her noise at this point as it was making me a little crazy and I put her in the large cat carrier and put her in the garage. A nice quiet "time out" if you will. I came back for her about an hour later and she'd laid her egg and was happy to quietly re-join the others. I then picked up the eggs that the others had laid and went back in.

I have no idea why the chickens are convinced there is only, and i mean only, one place to lay eggs, but they have. Apparently Cadbury doesn't like standing in line waiting for "the spot".

OMG almost this same thing just happened at my house. Onyxia has been laying between 9:30 and 10:30 every day and Phillie was late afternoon her first egg, then skipped a day, then 8am yesterday. There was no egg from either of them by 10:30 today so I thought they were taking the day off. I went out to work in the garage for a few and came back inside and through the screen door could here someone flipping out in the coop. I went over and peeked in the window and Phillie was standing in a box and Ony was on the floor screaming bloody murder, soooooo loud. When they saw me they both came out of the coop. Ony then went back in. Phillie waited a few then she went back in. The strange thing is that when I looked in Phillie was in the right box and Ony always lays in the left box so I'm not sure why Ony was having such an issue with Phillie being in there. in any case now Ony is in the left box and all the other girls are in there on the floor waiting for her. Not sure if Phil laid yet but I don't want to disturb anyone so I'll wait until they're all out to see if anyone left presents.

 

[MandyFitch]

Hey, I just posted in the sick chickens forum but I want to repost with more questions here. Hope that's okay. Besides wanting to know if there's anything wrong with my featherless chicken with a bump on her breast (which could be the crop?) I also need to make a decision about sand vs straw for the bottom of the coop.

The new coop / run arrives tomorrow. It doesn't have a floor and I don't have grass, just granite gravel covering very hard clay. I'm in the process of raking away all the large stones so the birds will have a softer place to walk around. I could leave it bare or cover it with sand or straw. At the moment, the coop they're in STINKS, even though I hose off the gravel every day. I need something that will clean better.

Since there's no floor to the coop, won't sand just leak out under the edges of the coop? How deep is your sand? If I use straw, how deep do I layer that? Does the deep layer method work in the dessert?

If anyone has a composter they love, share the info?

Okay, if you've come this far, here are the photos of my funny looking chick. None of the others have this problem. Thanks!

 

[Twinklin]

Hey, I just posted in the sick chickens forum but I want to repost with more questions here. Hope that's okay. Besides wanting to know if there's anything wrong with my featherless chicken with a bump on her breast (which could be the crop?) I also need to make a decision about sand vs straw for the bottom of the coop.

The new coop / run arrives tomorrow. It doesn't have a floor and I don't have grass, just granite gravel covering very hard clay. I'm in the process of raking away all the large stones so the birds will have a softer place to walk around. I could leave it bare or cover it with sand or straw. At the moment, the coop they're in STINKS, even though I hose off the gravel every day. I need something that will clean better.

Since there's no floor to the coop, won't sand just leak out under the edges of the coop? How deep is your sand? If I use straw, how deep do I layer that? Does the deep layer method work in the dessert?

If anyone has a composter they love, share the info?

Okay, if you've come this far, here are the photos of my funny looking chick. None of the others have this problem. Thanks!

If she has sour or impacted crop the baldness could be her plucking feathers out because it's bothering her. The bump she has looks like when my EE had sour crop. If it's soft like a squishy balloon it could be sour, if it's hard it could be impacted.

This is what I do for sour crop

1. Hold chicken like a football, tilt until head is pointed down to the floor and massage crop to let her vomit letting her breathe in between until you get no more vomit.
2. Isolate chicken in area with no hay or pine shavings (sour crop is like an upset acidy stomach so the chickens will try to eat pine shavings and straw to try to settle it but this can make the problem worse and form a big clump in the crop. We found this out the hard way)
3. Make a thick soup from lactose free kefir milk and crumbles or smashed up pellet, feed only that until crop is empty in the morning.
4. Massage crop for a few minutes a few times a day
5. Make grit is available
6. add Apple Cider Vinegar to water. I used 1tsp/quart. (Some people say baking soda instead of ACV but I went with ACV and it worked well)

When our EE ate all the bedding and blocked up her crop we did pretty much the same process but would occasionally give her some vegetable oil before massaging the crop. It eventually broke up and dissolved.

We love having sand in both the coop and run. We have a solid coop floor and use the kitty litter scooping method to clean it out. It stays very dry and never smells. We have 2-3 inches in the coop and a thin layer on the dirt floor of the run. If the girls didn't free range as much we'd keep it deeper in the run, probably 3 inches. Since they range I have a dust bathing area in the corner of the yard that's bricked off and filled with sand and dirt for them. I'll never use anything else. I'd rather be able to remove the poop then let it sit and throw more stuff on top of it.

As for composting I had made a post a little while back with our barrel tumbler, I love it...
https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/31227/arizona-chickens/39970#post_12077963

While the stuff in the tumbler is cooking for 6 months I throw stuff in a trashcan which pretty much gets ignored, I don't wet it or anything. Once the tumbler is emptied I dump the trashcan's contents (leaves, grass, chicken poo) into the tumbler and start all over.

 

[Gallo del Cielo]

Quote: Tammy said she had a good feeling about them. A dad bought them for his 12 year old son who wants to incubate eggs. They have pullets & roos but are not laying yet.

Oh Mikey! I'm so sorry to hear of this. It must have been a hard decision to make. I'm glad you found a good home for them.

 

[Gallo del Cielo]

Hey, I just posted in the sick chickens forum but I want to repost with more questions here. Hope that's okay. Besides wanting to know if there's anything wrong with my featherless chicken with a bump on her breast (which could be the crop?) I also need to make a decision about sand vs straw for the bottom of the coop.

The new coop / run arrives tomorrow. It doesn't have a floor and I don't have grass, just granite gravel covering very hard clay. I'm in the process of raking away all the large stones so the birds will have a softer place to walk around. I could leave it bare or cover it with sand or straw. At the moment, the coop they're in STINKS, even though I hose off the gravel every day. I need something that will clean better.

Since there's no floor to the coop, won't sand just leak out under the edges of the coop? How deep is your sand? If I use straw, how deep do I layer that? Does the deep layer method work in the dessert?

If anyone has a composter they love, share the info?

Okay, if you've come this far, here are the photos of my funny looking chick. None of the others have this problem. Thanks!

I don't think the chick looks all that unusual for its age, even with the lack of feathers. The bump you're seeing is probably its crop. Check it very early tomorrow morning to find out if it's gone down (it should).

I would collect up all of the gravel. Your birds will be much happier on soil, whether it be native or hauled in sand. My coop has a dirt floor on which I put sand down every few months (about an inch). It doesn't leak out, but I lose a bit over time when raking up the droppings. About every other day I scrape off the roost and rake up the droppings. If I were to lead a blind-folded person into my coop, they wouldn't know it housed chickens by the smell (you would smell the herbs in the nest boxes though).

I have three compost bins. Two were made by a local high school group from recycled city trash cans and one is a basic black plastic bin that you might find at any big box store. They all work well and I usually keep all three cooking at top speed. Well, two of them anyway, I usually use the third for finishing the compost. I stir the compost every day to every few days (depending on the stage of composting) with a compost crank (made right here in Tucson). I'm a mad composter and the three bins usually meet all my needs. Occasionally, I run out of space though and I have 3' diameter X 2' high hardware cloth wire cylinders lined with 6mil black plastic that I use. If money were no option, I'd have a couple cylindrical rotating bins.

You can see my three bins in this pic:

 

[pipemum]

mandyfitch, it's possible your coop could be smelling because you're spraying it every day. When my run smelled, it was because I was wetting it down everyday. I use a combo of sand and pine shavings in the run now, and yes, the pine and sand 'leak' out of the run sides a bit. It's only a concern where it backs against the shed--the sand/shavings/feathers level is rising closer and closer to the shed siding, and that's not good. I'll have to get a blower or something to blow it out eventually. In my coop, I only use pine shavings. I clean the droppings in the coop once a week, and there's really no smell at all. Well, it smells dry, dusty, and piney. I guess my run could work as deep litter, but I like to use the compost from the run, so it's raked 1x a month or so. Since I've been keeping the run dry, there hasn't been an unpleasant smell. Oh, I tried straw in the beginning and didn't like it. I found it to be smelly, but again, I was getting the run damp, so that was probably it.

I don't know about the lumpy chick. In one photo, all I see is normal breastbone, in the others the lump looks a little low to be crop but I have no idea. I hope she's okay.

I have a big, black composter that worked great for years, but 9 years later the plastic starting to break down. The black bin gets all food related and garden compost. I have another composter made from pallets that I just use for chicken coop/run materials. That stuff breaks down quickly and I've already been able to use it in my garden beds--this compost is open and I don't want to attract packrats to any food waste. I found that I really have to keep my compost materials (both bins) wet to get a good thing going. For years, I didn't keep a moist enough compost and while things broke down, it was a slow process!

 

[pipemum]

3 of my chickens are driving me crazy. The two Polish mixes are just kinda...useless, and one of the barred rocks is turning mean. She's not the lead hen, she actively ignores the lead hen, but she's second in charge and a huge bully. I really don't like her. She's fond of pecking and grabbing the combs and wattles of the others. Every squeal and squawk of complaint I hear is her causing the ruckus. I don't like it. With only 6 chickens, I don't really have the patience to have a nasty one in the group. This seems to be recent, and she's going to lay any day, so perhaps she's overwhelmed with hormones. She gets a month to shape up. Clock is ticking!

 

[maryhysong]

Hey, I just posted in the sick chickens forum but I want to repost with more questions here. Hope that's okay. Besides wanting to know if there's anything wrong with my featherless chicken with a bump on her breast (which could be the crop?) I also need to make a decision about sand vs straw for the bottom of the coop.

The new coop / run arrives tomorrow. It doesn't have a floor and I don't have grass, just granite gravel covering very hard clay. I'm in the process of raking away all the large stones so the birds will have a softer place to walk around. I could leave it bare or cover it with sand or straw. At the moment, the coop they're in STINKS, even though I hose off the gravel every day. I need something that will clean better.

Since there's no floor to the coop, won't sand just leak out under the edges of the coop? How deep is your sand? If I use straw, how deep do I layer that? Does the deep layer method work in the dessert?

If anyone has a composter they love, share the info?

I love deep litter and have used tons of straw, shredded paper, shavings, ect. Over the fall and winter I will collect whatever bags of leaves I can find. My hoop coop was built straight on rocky, hard caliche. I laid down thick flakes of straw to cover. When the straw started looking poopy I fluffed it up with my digging fork. When it got real bad I just added more straw on top.Around the waterer it stays fairly damp from dumping out the dirty water and of course the hose running when I"m fooling with it. Also around most of the edges it will get wet where the rain blows in at the bottom. There are now tons of earthworms growing in there and everything has composted really nicely. I just took some of it out for the garden and I'll be adding more straw or shavings for the winter.

 

[Gallo del Cielo]

mandyfitch, it's possible your coop could be smelling because you're spraying it every day. When my run smelled, it was because I was wetting it down everyday. I use a combo of sand and pine shavings in the run now, and yes, the pine and sand 'leak' out of the run sides a bit. It's only a concern where it backs against the shed--the sand/shavings/feathers level is rising closer and closer to the shed siding, and that's not good. I'll have to get a blower or something to blow it out eventually. In my coop, I only use pine shavings. I clean the droppings in the coop once a week, and there's really no smell at all. Well, it smells dry, dusty, and piney. I guess my run could work as deep litter, but I like to use the compost from the run, so it's raked 1x a month or so. Since I've been keeping the run dry, there hasn't been an unpleasant smell. Oh, I tried straw in the beginning and didn't like it. I found it to be smelly, but again, I was getting the run damp, so that was probably it.

I don't know about the lumpy chick. In one photo, all I see is normal breastbone, in the others the lump looks a little low to be crop but I have no idea. I hope she's okay.

I have a big, black composter that worked great for years, but 9 years later the plastic starting to break down. The black bin gets all food related and garden compost. I have another composter made from pallets that I just use for chicken coop/run materials. That stuff breaks down quickly and I've already been able to use it in my garden beds--this compost is open and I don't want to attract packrats to any food waste. I found that I really have to keep my compost materials (both bins) wet to get a good thing going. For years, I didn't keep a moist enough compost and while things broke down, it was a slow process!

I think you're right about moisture on both counts--the smell and the speed of composting. I'm sure that the main reason my coop doesn't smell bad is because it's so dry. Keeping your compost about as moist as a damp sponge will really help the process (in addition to turning). It takes just about a month to cook down most of what is in one of my compost bins (woody parts take longer) but if I were to let it dry out at any point, it would take much longer. I recently had one of the plastic connector pieces break on my commercial bin, I hope it's not already breaking down!

 

[MandyFitch]

Thanks for the replies. My friend kindly picked up a huge bale of straw for me - a "coop warming" gift, if you will. So at least for the moment, I will be going that route.

The crop (if that's what it is) is very soft and pliable. I will watch it. I've been giving them a lot of yummies besides their chick food; wet almond meal left over from making almond milk, loads of carrot, pear, spinach,kale, apple pulp from the local organic juice shop, juicy cantaloupe rinds... My family is BIG on produce.

Maybe I'm overfeeding?