Arizona Chickens

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Great, those are so cute....I do not need a bunny. I do not need a bunny. I do not need a bunny. Oh dear.....I am not sure it is working!

Really, I don't. But one day, I might have to take a harder look at rabbits. They are so cute.

Nessa - It sounds like chickens have been a really great blessing in your life.

PS - Can you tell I am having trouble with doing the sleeping thing.
 
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Good morning all!

RRR- Looked at the bunnies site. My bunnies must have been rex rabbits, but they were the large size?

I saw an interesting documentary on KUAT last night. Even the 4-year-old watched it with undivided attention. It was called "Rat Attack" and documented the Mataum: the end of a 48-year growth cycle which ends in the mass blooming, fruiting, and die off of all the bamboo in Southeast India/Asia. The bamboo drops so much fruit, that by the end of the season, the rat population has boomed to 12,000 rats per acre. Yes, PER ACRE. The bamboo die-off coincides with the rice harvest--so the farmers will go out one morning, ready to harvest, and the rats will have completely cleaned out their feilds overnight. Facinating.

Anywhoo- as a side note, they mentioned a ground pheasant which also specializes/takes advatage of the mass fruiting.

NARRATOR: Many species of bamboo share this internal clock, but the Melocanna bamboo, common in Mizoram, boasts one final asset for survival: its fruit, with seed inside, is huge, 200-times larger than the average. This builtin food supply insures that the plant will survive. Mass seeding events like these have had some unexpected benefits for species other than bamboo. For example, they may have led to the domestication of the chicken.

DANIEL JANZEN (University of Pennsylvania): If you look at chickens as a whole, they're just a pheasant. And there are many, many species of pheasant in the Old World. One of them specialized on bamboo seeds, and that gave it a very different biology than all the other pheasant species have.

NARRATOR: Throughout Southeast Asia, wild chickens are called "bamboo fowl." And according to Janzen's theory, long before people began farming, these wild chickens learned to reproduce like crazy during mass seeding events. That set the stage for domestication.

DANIEL JANZEN: And, of course, what happened was people then, sometime in the distant past, basically started feeding chickens scraps from the house, whatever it happens to be, and then the chickens turned on, at the house, like, sort of, a miniature bamboo seed crop. And suddenly you have a domestic animal who's just really doing the same thing that it always did in nature.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/rats/program.html
 
Laree, Mini Rex is like a bantam or the Rex breed. Lol. My faveroit breed purely by looks is the Thriantas. IM ON FIRE BABY! Pretty cool documentary, I never knew anything about bamboo fruit!

Becky, I am pretty sure it won't be used for chickens, in fact that would most likely thin the shells and rot them. However most reptile incubators require such a thing.
 
I figured I'd ask in here because we all know Arizona weather. Ive been here forever, but this is my first summer with chickens. Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas on keeping chicks cool in the warm weather? Yesterday it was so warm in the afternoon/early evening hours. My brooder lights were off all day (the first time they have needed to be turned off completely). My chicks were all laying out on the brooder floor and I used a mist spray bottle to cool them off in the brooder. Our coop is on the side where the sun comes down. I also wet down half the ground inside the pens with the hose so they could roll around in the dirt if they wanted to (they seem to enjoy that when I spill their water fountains in there.

Should I set up a mister system? Sprinklers? Fans?

Im going to go over to Home Depot and get some of that sun screen material in their garden section and hang it on the trellace of the coop to hopefully reduce some of the heat that comes into the coop. We planted some trees on this side of the house...but they wont be mature enough to provide any shade for several years.
 
Hey AZ folks, just took some new pics of my Aloha chickens!

Wanted to share, and BTW, I do have an extra youngster roo if anyone is interested in crossing with their "regular" chickens. The roo is mostly white, but has mottled genetics. And he is FREE. He is too nice to eat, so email me if you want him, we're always looking for new Aloha members. He would work best crossed with RIR, Buff Orp, Speckled Sussex, and those types of mixes.

New pics of the adults:

DSC01895.jpg


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DSC01864.jpg


Love this overcast light, it is the best for getting pix without harsh shadows! Take advantage of it, everybody - we rarely get any cloud cover out here, LOL!

Sommer
 
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What mahonri said. If you could possibly get them on the east side of your house, that would be a huge step in changing the weather for them. Our coop area is under two trees, and we do have a mister. You can pick up a $10 mister at Home Depot while you are there. We have the shade screen stuff, too.
 

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