Thailander
Chirping
After browsing the forums for a couple of months I decided it was time to join the party, so today I signed up. This is my first time to raise poultry, though it's an idea I've had for quite some time. But with the local price of eggs here in Thailand only 10 cents each for medium chicken eggs, and 15 cents for jumbo duck eggs, it's hard to justify the expense and certainly not something that's going to be profitable if I end up buying commercial feed. So that's held me back till now. But with 8 medium to large size dogs to feed, I decided I'd rather spend the money on chicken feed than dog food, so I can transition to raw feeding and hopefully recoup some of the cost selling the eggcesse eggs (I like bad puns). So I decided it was time to get some domestic chicks.
I first built a small incubator out of an ice cooler and bought some eggs at the local fresh market to see if I could hatch them myself. After a few tries I gave up, they weren't fertile. All the local shops and vendors are apparently just reselling commercially produced eggs they buy at the central fresh market downtown.
So I bought some duck eggs from a table top display at a small outdoor restaurant I frequent, and tried hatching those. Unfortunately, I had recently added a fan to the incubator, and when I closed the vents for lockdown, the trapped heat from the fan motor drove the interior temp to over 40C. Failed again. Decided to do an eggtopsy to see what I was trying to hatch, expecting Khaki Campbells as they're pretty common here. Imagine my surprise to find dead drowned baby ducks with claws, and huge yolk sacks still not absorbed after 28 days... So unplug the fan and back to the restuarant for some more Muscovy eggs.... end of this month is the due date... Attempting to dry hatch this time, our relative humidity is always 25 to 35 percent. And waiting till day 30 to boost the humidity for hatching.
In the meantime....
I had built a small chicken (duck) tractor thinking I was hatching ducks, so I didn't need a perch or high roof line, but I needed access down top of the entire length of the tractor for the randomly placed eggs I expect to get eventually. I deliberately kept the height low enough to pass under the elevated drip irrigation lines in my garden, so I can use the Muscovies to weed between the raised beds, which will be used to grow small fruit trees. My next tractor will include an elevated section so the Muscovies can perch, assuming I ever get live birds.
In the meantime meantime...
While waiting for the eggs to hatch, I began to hear the cry of some roosters behind my land. My property is the last cleared area before the undeveloped area which sits between my homestead and the foothills of a mountain range which is protected from development and eventually abuts Thailand's largest national park. So I am literally living on the edge of undeveloped jungle. Since Thailand has had chickens for probably thousands of years, who are always allowed to run freey around their owner's properties, I assumed they were either recent escapees from one of my neighbors, or perhaps feral chickens coming down from the jungle. Either way, an opportunity to build a small flock of chickens if I could catch them, right? Not quite...
Last year, these same foothills were the site of a massive forrest fire which burned for several weeks. This has resulted in a huge swath of disturbed forest which has been regrowing for the last several months. It turns out this is the ideal environement for jungle fowl, which have seen a massive population explosion. By putting out some uncooked rice and getting them used to my presence, over the course of several weeks I successfully overcame their shy nature and lured them into my yard, and eventually into the empty dog pen waiting for them. I am now the proud owner of two red jungle fowl hens and one rooster. Since the middle of last month, I have been gifted with two 25 gram eggs a day for my trouble, with only a couple of days missed. I have almost a dozen in the incubator with the Muscovy eggs, all with the same due date. So I can also confirm, there is nothing unique about the ability of chickens to lay eggs daily, this ability comes naturally from their original wild cousins, and appears to be a result of collecting their eggs every day so they never get broody.
My other hobby is raising Dobermans, which means I will have to keep a careful separation between my future flocks and my pups. I also am growing mangoes and marian plums. In my marian plum orchard, about a kilometer from my homestead, there is separate flock of jungle fowl who have taken to roost in the fruit trees. The ones I captured on my homestead have red earings. The ones at the orchard have white earings, a different sub-species. I've started to scatter dry rice kernals around the (as yet) incomplete chicken tractor I placed in the middle of the orchard... I think you can see where this is going?
Maybe one day I'll get back to the idea of getting some domestic chickens, but for now, I have my hands full.
I first built a small incubator out of an ice cooler and bought some eggs at the local fresh market to see if I could hatch them myself. After a few tries I gave up, they weren't fertile. All the local shops and vendors are apparently just reselling commercially produced eggs they buy at the central fresh market downtown.
So I bought some duck eggs from a table top display at a small outdoor restaurant I frequent, and tried hatching those. Unfortunately, I had recently added a fan to the incubator, and when I closed the vents for lockdown, the trapped heat from the fan motor drove the interior temp to over 40C. Failed again. Decided to do an eggtopsy to see what I was trying to hatch, expecting Khaki Campbells as they're pretty common here. Imagine my surprise to find dead drowned baby ducks with claws, and huge yolk sacks still not absorbed after 28 days... So unplug the fan and back to the restuarant for some more Muscovy eggs.... end of this month is the due date... Attempting to dry hatch this time, our relative humidity is always 25 to 35 percent. And waiting till day 30 to boost the humidity for hatching.
In the meantime....
I had built a small chicken (duck) tractor thinking I was hatching ducks, so I didn't need a perch or high roof line, but I needed access down top of the entire length of the tractor for the randomly placed eggs I expect to get eventually. I deliberately kept the height low enough to pass under the elevated drip irrigation lines in my garden, so I can use the Muscovies to weed between the raised beds, which will be used to grow small fruit trees. My next tractor will include an elevated section so the Muscovies can perch, assuming I ever get live birds.
In the meantime meantime...
While waiting for the eggs to hatch, I began to hear the cry of some roosters behind my land. My property is the last cleared area before the undeveloped area which sits between my homestead and the foothills of a mountain range which is protected from development and eventually abuts Thailand's largest national park. So I am literally living on the edge of undeveloped jungle. Since Thailand has had chickens for probably thousands of years, who are always allowed to run freey around their owner's properties, I assumed they were either recent escapees from one of my neighbors, or perhaps feral chickens coming down from the jungle. Either way, an opportunity to build a small flock of chickens if I could catch them, right? Not quite...
Last year, these same foothills were the site of a massive forrest fire which burned for several weeks. This has resulted in a huge swath of disturbed forest which has been regrowing for the last several months. It turns out this is the ideal environement for jungle fowl, which have seen a massive population explosion. By putting out some uncooked rice and getting them used to my presence, over the course of several weeks I successfully overcame their shy nature and lured them into my yard, and eventually into the empty dog pen waiting for them. I am now the proud owner of two red jungle fowl hens and one rooster. Since the middle of last month, I have been gifted with two 25 gram eggs a day for my trouble, with only a couple of days missed. I have almost a dozen in the incubator with the Muscovy eggs, all with the same due date. So I can also confirm, there is nothing unique about the ability of chickens to lay eggs daily, this ability comes naturally from their original wild cousins, and appears to be a result of collecting their eggs every day so they never get broody.
My other hobby is raising Dobermans, which means I will have to keep a careful separation between my future flocks and my pups. I also am growing mangoes and marian plums. In my marian plum orchard, about a kilometer from my homestead, there is separate flock of jungle fowl who have taken to roost in the fruit trees. The ones I captured on my homestead have red earings. The ones at the orchard have white earings, a different sub-species. I've started to scatter dry rice kernals around the (as yet) incomplete chicken tractor I placed in the middle of the orchard... I think you can see where this is going?
Maybe one day I'll get back to the idea of getting some domestic chickens, but for now, I have my hands full.
Great introduction!
