My chickens love this leaf... what is it?

[ldemmert]

Try http://orb.at.ufl.edu/FloridaTrees/selectiondetail.htm to find your answer. I tried but don't have enough information, like how tall and broad and the trunk appearance. I did find lots of trees that it isn't!

 

[Camelot Farms]

There are several other kinds of Locust...Black Locust I think is another thought

You would know if it was Thorny Locust...OUCH! lol

 

[ChooksChick]

Could it be a Mimosa?

Let me go get the Encyclopedia of Horticulture...it's my favorite book....brb

 

[wegotchickens]

Sounds like a Mimosa to me.
Do the red feathery flowers make you think of the Lorax story by Dr Suess?

 

[Renee']

My guess is mimosa too.

 

[Rocky Top Chick]

Mine LOVE locust of any kind. They beg for it !!!

 

[Happy Chooks]

My first thought was Mimosa.

 

[ERnoleGuy]

That might be it.

That looks much more like it. Those are exactly what the flowers look like. But the leaves do not have that little point on the end like I saw when I Googled it. There are only a few flowers left on it right now because it's late in the season. Also, this one has a nice straight single trunk for the most part. I really wanted to take a picture but I just got home and it's pouring outside. And living in the lightning capital of the world I foresee my power going out any second now. (It's been out 3 times in the past 2 weeks, for an avg. of 12 hour at a time, thanks to this wonderful lightning.)

 

[kwynn's birds Alaska]

Quote:
I was thinking that too. I had a sensitive plant last year, I believe it was a type of mimosa. It's leaves looked like those, except mine was kept as ahouseplant, so it was not near as big. It did have little thorns onit, butI didn't have it long enough to flower

 

[digitS']

. . . to throw a wet blanket on the prospect of feeding black locust to your chickens:

In Diseases of Poultry, editor Y. M. Saif. page 1149, under phytotoxins: "Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) Part of Plant. Leaf. Signs and Lesions. Depression and paralysis; hemorrhagic enteritis."

There's lots of evidence of locust poisoning horses.

Here's what the Canadian Poisonous Plants Information System says about black locust: "Notes on poisoning:

Chickens were poisoned after ingesting leaf material. Degenerative changes in the liver and kidney occurred. A toxic phytohemagglutinin extracted from the plant caused fatty degeneration of the liver and death in chick embryos, at doses of 0.25-2.0 mg per egg (Kingsbury 1964, Cooper and Johnson 1984)."

I vote for Mimosa . . . don't know about its toxicity, if any. UCDavis and the ASPCA cover a lot of landscape and house plants and don't list it as toxic.

Steve