I just found this thread, and I'm loving it! Now I have to share. When we lived in the desert, there's this critter called a sun spider (actually not a spider at all, it's a sopulgid). Whatever. You've probably seen pictures of these things; they are the infamous "Camel Spiders" in that Internet photo from the Kuwait/Iraq War. Now that photo is a little misleading as to the critter's size, I'll admit, but it does show a nice close-up of their anatomy.
The sun spider grows to a leg-span the size of my hand (that's eight inches), has a double set of nasty big fangs, has a body the size of my thumb, and they are everywhere down where we lived. It has eight legs plus a super-long pair of pedipalps that it carries out in front of it, so when you spot one it looks like it's coming towards you to give you a great big hug! They move like all blazes, you can barely see the blur, and then when they stop moving you really wish they hadn't. I have seen them chase cats. I have had them accost me in the shower, where the acoustics are particularly good. They give me the oh-be-gosh heebie-jeebies like nothing else on this planet.
So our old chicken coop was an open type, with hardware cloth up to four feet and then chicken wire. (Doesn't matter. These things can climb glass.) I used to keep a rag tucked into the roof, beneath the plywood panels. One morning I was putting feed down for the three-week-old chicks in the nursery, and got poo on my hands. So I pulled the rag down to wipe my hands . . . and it unrolled, and a gigantic sun spider went PLOP onto the sand right in front of my feet.
I nearly levitated. I did scream. All I could think was that the spider, in its fright, would either bite a chick or go shooting straight up my leg, in which case I was going to suffer a coronary episode on the spot. I was just starting to reach for the Spider-Thumpin' Log that lives in the corner of the coop, when the cavalry arrived. You guessed it. Two dozen lil' babies, all squealing in glee, descended upon that spider like fluffy piranha. It disappeared from sight beneath the scrimmage . . . and then reappeared in two dozen pieces, each one speeding along in the beak of a chick. Meanwhile the hens yelled jealously from outside the nursery.
So it's amazing what chickens will eat. We also trained several youngsters to hop down off the perches at night and chase after the cockroaches. There's a species of roach that actually prefers leaf litter and doesn't want to come into your house. They would, however, come into the coop to dine on spilled feed. Once the young birds figured out how to follow a flashlight, we held a nightly Bug Hunt in that coop all summer long.
