hens won't eat protein; prefer wild bird seed mix

[chickpuffs]

Hi,
I'm a newbie; love my chicks.
A little problem:
my two bantam hens (3 years old) haven't been laying much since summer. I ordinarily feed them a protein crumble for hens (Purina,etc) and mix in equal amount of wild bird seed for them to scratch. Well, for a long time they simply quit eating their crumble and only pick out the seed they want. I tried just giving them crumble, but it didn't solve the problem. I'm afraid that they're not getting optimal nutrition. Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Jen

 

[HouseCat]

I had the same problem when I first got my banties. Come winter, they couldn't forage to supplement their diet and I realized they were only eating the bird seed. Eventually their feathers started falling out and they got a pretty bad case of lice. I had to quit buying bird seed all together and switched to the All-Flock blend. They would get a small amount of scratch at night and free access to their All-Flock ration. It seemed that they became addicted to the seed and quit eating their ration. It finally dawned on me when I went 2 months on one bag of feed. I threw out the old feed and got them a fresh bag of All-Flock.
It took some tough love and a few nights going to bed hungry but they came around, grew all of their feathers back, and I got rid of the lice.
Good luck