Eating mushrooms...

[Dayrel]

I'm a chicken newbie. Spring has been pretty wet in Indiana. I've had different forms of mushrooms pop-up in my backyard- at least 4 types that I've seen. I don't eat mushrooms and know nothing about varieties and which are poisonous. This morning, I saw one of my chickens excitedly munching on a mushroom. I quickly separated her from it until I could get more info.

I did some searching on BYC and found the following info:

Mushrooms: Amanita spp. Death Cap, Destroying Angel, Panther Cap. Extremely deadly and poisonous if ingested.

Do chickens know to avoid these mushrooms or do I need to learn about them and protect them? Any problem with letting them free-range "safe" mushrooms?

Thanks.

 

[Top Rooster]

It seems to me I realized animals tend to be smart when it comes to eating food their instincts know what's poisonous and what's not. Many things that are poisonous to us may not be to them I wouldn't worry about if I were you,but you can keep her separate to see if she develops any sickness or side effects. You can smash up the shrooms if you think they may be dangerous to them

 

[Folly's place]

I also have mushrooms everywhere right now (all except those missing morels!) and hope that my chickens stay smart about them. There's no way to remove all the caps that arrive every morning, so given that the flock has lots of other good stuff to eat, they do seem to not get poisoned by them. You can try to ID the different types by looking online, or in a book; I assume that they are all deadly except the morels. Mary

 

[sc000000bysnack]

I'm a noob myself, but I have a family member who has raised Bantams a long time. He always says that chickens naturally stay away from poisonous plants. So, if she ate it, its extremely unlikely that she'll have some type of bad reaction to it. Also, there are several really informative sites that pop-up if you google your question.

 

[Dayrel]

I'm a noob myself, but I have a family member who has raised Bantams a long time. He always says that chickens naturally stay away from poisonous plants. So, if she ate it, its extremely unlikely that she'll have some type of bad reaction to it. Also, there are several really informative sites that pop-up if you google your question.

I get lazy after finding so many answers on this site. I tried Googling for chickens and mushrooms and unfortunately didn't really find anything more helpful than here. Answers range from "mushrooms improve disease resistance" to "be careful which mushrooms they eat" to "I only feed known safe mushrooms" to "my chicken died after eating mushrooms".

Unfortunately, chickens might shy away from dangerous plants, but that is far from perfect as the list of plants that you need to protect them from and posts about chickens that have died or gotten sick will attest.

 

[SueT]

Chickens have been free ranging throughout history and around the world, and Mother Nature has given them some very good instincts about what to eat and what not to eat. I would be less concerned about plant life, and more concerned about man-made toxins that they might ingest.