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Wow! I want to try this? How did you do it?
I panned the coops the other night with a flashlight and was horrified to see roaches all over the back walls and playing leapfrog in the litter while my silkies slept peacefully.....oblivious to the insect mayhem all around them! I couldn't get them to wake up and chase them. Silkies are such "slugs" sometimes.
My most pressing question is: If I use Sevin dust in my litter and the roaches ingest it.....will the chickens be poisoned by eating them?
Same question about the "Orange Guard" spray?
With the Sevin Dust, I think you're OK: wildlife rehabbers use Sevin Dust on baby birds and I've used it on my adult chickens. When they preen, they end up ingesting a little, but they do OK--Sevin Dust acts on nerve receptors that birds have very few of. The Sevin Dust actually kills insects on contact--they don't have to eat it. So you should be OK with it, unless you used a huge amount. I don't know anything about Orange Guard.
Training the chicks . . . we started by coming out to the coop just as the birds were going to bed, and picked up the waterer. Roaches scurried out. Our chicks at that time were Andalusian crosses about a month old, four roos and a hen, and they were very competitive! I think their mother had shown them that roaches were tasty at some point. Anyway, one of the chicks saw a roach and ran after it, which caught the attention of the others, and before long they were all on the hunt.
Once the chicks were used to this--and it didn't take long--then we started coming out later and later. It took some coaxing at first to get the chicks to hop down off the perches in poor light: chickens do not have good night vision at all, and a flashlight does not light up the surroundings well enough for them to have good depth perception. They knew what they were missing, though, and they really, really wanted the roaches. The roos in particular tended to just fall off the perches, bounce, settle their feathers, and stomp off in pursuit.
Every time we hit a roach with the flashlight beam, of course it would try to escape it. And even if the chick was hot on the tail of the roach, if it got out of the beam, they couldn't see it. This meant that a roach could escape if it doubled back and ran under the chick to hide in its shadow. It was easier for the chicks to catch their prey if we had two people with flashlights out there. The chicks learned fast that where the lights were, food was also there.
At the end of the buggy round-up, the hardest part was getting them to go back to the perches! That depth perception thing, again. They'd spend ages on the ground squinting up at the perch, bobbing their heads back and forth, then suddenly leap up in a frantic whirl of wings and legs and grab the perch as they went by. Watching them go back to bed was almost as funny as watching them chase the roaches!
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