Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[bruceha2000]

The CX sold at our farmer's market are pastured. I would think that is the norm for a farmer's market. Are they not at your market?

Show me your chicken keeping arrangements, include the run, the total area of the land they have access to, the number of roosters you have and the number of nest sites.

Don't you think @HiEverybirdy has paid enough tax for the moment?

 

[Iluveggers]

Here’s some owed tax. The favorite dust bathing spot in the veggie garden. It’s right next to a raised bed with a trellis.

The second pic is one of the unplanted beds.

They have access to everything except the asparagus and garlic rows right now. In the process of building a second larger run area on the other side of the veggie garden fence so my seedlings can safely be planted in a few weeks! Covered run is 160 sq ft, garden area is about 600 sq ft. New section will be about 300 sq ft. Im hoping the rotation will help both areas rest between grazing times, and give the ladies a bit more freedom. I do let them free range the whole yard when the family is outside to supervise, but we have a neighbor with a dog on one side, and woods with coyotes and fox on the back of our property so I wouldn’t let them out alone as they could end up in the woods. My dogs do a very good job of patrolling our yard enough that it seems other animals have picked up their scent and steer clear, but the woods are nobody’s territory and much more dangerous:

 

[Shadrach]

It rained this morning but stayed dry in the afternoon. A bit less windy than yesterday which made a pleasant change. I've been weeding the nettles in the allotment run. Eradication is almost impossible but getting the area by the coop run clear is an annual task.

We all went out for a couple of hours.

Lima went to roost with a crop about twice the size of yeaterday which I'm taking as a good sign. I'm going to try giving her Oregano. My friend in the next county up uses Oregano to treat his chickens and he says he has positive results. There are various studies. Here's one.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6182053/

 

[Shadrach]

@Shadrach I took this video of the egg call with your theory about calling the rooster in mind.

Often in our bigger group, there's a hen who seems possessed by the holy spirit of egg calling and calls for 20 minutes at time. It's most often one of the Brahmas (tip-top of the pecking order), but if they don't step up, a lower-ranked bird might.

A rooster might call back or come by, but often the announcer has no intention of laying at that time, so she's not calling him for a personal escort, nor is she loudly complaining that someone's in her nesting box (that's a different sound).

In fact, this usually happens when several hens are sitting at the same time in the big coop, and I've begun to think the sound is meant to be intimidating or to establish territory. Maybe a, "There are big, loud dinosaurs in here. Don't come in here!" Like the announcer is some kind of security guard.

Not sure how completely this theory tracks, but it's been percolating in my head for a while, so I thought I'd share it here.

The behavioural study problem.

1) In order to study behaviour one has to let the subject/s behave.

2) In order to study natural behaviour one has to let the subject/s behave in a natural manner.

I’ll take an extreme example just to illustrate the point. A study of a man confined to an eight cubic foot room where he is supplied food and water through a hatch is likely to give vastly different data to a study of that same man left to fend for himself in a jungle.

Does anyone disagree with this?

When trying to study natural behaviour one has to make some assumptions as to what is the more natural environment, the eight cubic foot room, or the jungle in the example above.

There is an added problem that the observer influences the behaviour of the subject. Initially in the example above the man in the cube if he is aware he is under observation will alter his behaviour to some extent because he knows he is under observation. Given a long enough time span the presence of the observer becomes less critical in influencing the man’s behaviour; the observation eventually becomes the normal.

There are certain behaviours that are hard coded into any creature, the drive to eat drink and procreate are some.

3) There is an ongoing debate about which behaviours can be considered hard coded and what behaviours are entirely dependant on environmental conditions. A simplistic phrase for this debate is the nurture versus nature.

How does one test what is natural and what is nurture?

How does one decide when what was nurture becomes natural or visa versa?

Here on BYC the vast majority of those who keep chickens rarely see what a chickens natural behaviour is. Without wishing to offend anyone for most chickens kept in back yards their environment is closer to the eight foot cubic box than it is to the jungle.

Free range. As far as the eye can see and a National Park after.

Confined with occasional afternoons out under supervision.

I spent ten years working with the chickens in Catalonia and eight of those years were spent knowingly attempting to study their behaviour. These were free range chickens. There were no physical barriers that would prevent the chickens from travelling miles in any direction.

In an average day I spent eight hours with chickens within eyesight as I worked on the land and later in even when in my house.

Essentially the chickens did exactly as they pleased on twelve acres of mixed woodland, fields of crops and the semi managed areas close to the houses. The only restriction was that for most, but not all of the time, I encouraged the chickens to roost in coops. For periods of time one tribe or another would take to the trees and often the males that got expelled from the tribes would roost where they could find a place where they felt safe. This was worlds away from the coop and run keeping conditions most here on BYC have. I would argue that this was as natural an environment as could be achieved without the chickens being completely feral.

I cared for between five and three tribes, plus the satellite males while they tried to establish their own tribes and attract the pullets that hatched as mates. There are pictures and stories relating to the events spread all over BYC from the later years. In the earlier years I didn’t have a camera but I did keep a diary.

Each tribe had at least two hens per rooster, sometimes as many as six or seven. That’s an awful lot of egg songs in a day when they were laying.

Add to this that many of the other farms in the valley also had free range groups and a roosters call from a mile away on another farm could be heard by the roosters in my care. This was similar to what a breeding pair of jungle fowl would experience. Of course, with that kind of freedom and that kind of environment changes in the environment occurred on a daily basis. This just doesn’t happen in coop and run chicken keeping. On an average day I would hear the egg song throughout the day as the hens from various tribes left their tribes to lay their eggs, sometimes in their tribe coops, sometimes in another tribes coops, often in nests on the land perhaps five hundred yards from their tribes coop and territory.

I have heard thousands of egg songs over the ten years and seen thousands of rooster responses and what I saw was what led me to believe that the so called egg song was in fact a call for a rooster and from these observations I wrote a summary article which I published here on BYC.

This thread might give an idea of the level of observation.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/cooperative-behavior.1288804/

Fortunately there were other free range keepers I got to know in Catalonia and the hens call for a rooster was understood and even here on BYC in the reviews and comments on the article I wrote others have witnessed the same behaviour although some were not aware of it’s significance.

So why isn’t the Escort call common knowledge on BYC?

There are lots of reasons. One reason was illustrated by a Catalan chicken keeping friend who when I tried to get him to join the site said to me after reading for a few days “Site is called wrong. It should be called Backyard Hens.”

There is large percentage of members here that don’t keep roosters so they wouldn’t have seen the behaviour under discussion.

They hear the sounds that the hens make and having no other evidence to suggest differently assume the sound is to do with laying the egg, which is only partially correct.

Many of those who do keep roosters do so in a coop and run environment. Why would a rooster in such conditions respond to an escort call when the hen is only a few feet from him, usually in full sight and there are no other roosters that might want to mate with the hen.

This is what I’ve observed with Henry. He rarely bothers doing much more that a token reply to the escort call because he knows exactly where the hen is and knows that there are no other roosters in the vicinity and the run is safe from predators.

The only times I’ve seen Henry respond to the escort call have been when he’s been on the allotments and the hen not in plain sight. He not only answered but went back to the coop to collect the hen.

So here is another point that needs to be taken into account; roosters are not stupid or robots and will make a risk assessment. In the case of confined groups there is no risk in the roosters eyes.

A further factor is roosters tend to respond to their favourite hens. It’s these hens he mates with most and these hens that he hopes will carry his genes forward.

In some keeping conditions the turnover of hens and roosters is so regular that the rooster doesn’t make a bond with any particular hen.

Finally for this discussion most people are not very good at observing their chickens. Often it isn’t the chicken that initially attracts the keepers attention that gives the best clue as to what is going on. Often it’s what the other chickens are doing/do when the event takes place that provides the better answer.

For a great many chicken keepers an hour a day with their chickens out of the coop and run is the amount of time they spend with their chickens bar the feeding and cleaning.

I doubt there is another person on this site that has spent as much time with chickens as I have. Most people have lives outside the world of chickens but for me for a decade my life was chickens and the other farm animals and even now living 6 miles away from the allotments where the chickens are I would bet I spend more time with chickens than the vast majority on this site. I don’t write this as any kind of condemnation of other chicken keepers, more as a statement of fact.

The egg song is in fact an escort call made by a hen for her rooster. The call is most often heard after a hen has laid an egg, but I have heard the same call for hens that have been separated from their tribe, got caught in a fight while crossing another tribes territory and in disputes over who should have nest priority when wanting to lay an egg.

 

[janiedoe]

The behavioural study problem.

1) In order to study behaviour one has to let the subject/s behave.

2) In order to study natural behaviour one has to let the subject/s behave in a natural manner.

I’ll take an extreme example just to illustrate the point. A study of a man confined to an eight cubic foot room where he is supplied food and water through a hatch is likely to give vastly different data to a study of that same man left to fend for himself in a jungle.

Does anyone disagree with this?

When trying to study natural behaviour one has to make some assumptions as to what is the more natural environment, the eight cubic foot room, or the jungle in the example above.

There is an added problem that the observer influences the behaviour of the subject. Initially in the example above the man in the cube if he is aware he is under observation will alter his behaviour to some extent because he knows he is under observation. Given a long enough time span the presence of the observer becomes less critical in influencing the man’s behaviour; the observation eventually becomes the normal.

There are certain behaviours that are hard coded into any creature, the drive to eat drink and procreate are some.

3) There is an ongoing debate about which behaviours can be considered hard coded and what behaviours are entirely dependant on environmental conditions. A simplistic phrase for this debate is the nurture versus nature.

How does one test what is natural and what is nurture?

How does one decide when what was nurture becomes natural or visa versa?

Here on BYC the vast majority of those who keep chickens rarely see what a chickens natural behaviour is. Without wishing to offend anyone for most chickens kept in back yards their environment is closer to the eight foot cubic box than it is to the jungle.

Free range. As far as the eye can see and a National Park after.

Confined with occasional afternoons out under supervision.

I spent ten years working with the chickens in Catalonia and eight of those years were spent knowingly attempting to study their behaviour. These were free range chickens. There were no physical barriers that would prevent the chickens from travelling miles in any direction.

In an average day I spent eight hours with chickens within eyesight as I worked on the land and later in even when in my house.

Essentially the chickens did exactly as they pleased on twelve acres of mixed woodland, fields of crops and the semi managed areas close to the houses. The only restriction was that for most, but not all of the time, I encouraged the chickens to roost in coops. For periods of time one tribe or another would take to the trees and often the males that got expelled from the tribes would roost where they could find a place where they felt safe. This was worlds away from the coop and run keeping conditions most here on BYC have. I would argue that this was as natural an environment as could be achieved without the chickens being completely feral.

I cared for between five and three tribes, plus the satellite males while they tried to establish their own tribes and attract the pullets that hatched as mates. There are pictures and stories relating to the events spread all over BYC from the later years. In the earlier years I didn’t have a camera but I did keep a diary.

Each tribe had at least two hens per rooster, sometimes as many as six or seven. That’s an awful lot of egg songs in a day when they were laying.

Add to this that many of the other farms in the valley also had free range groups and a roosters call from a mile away on another farm could be heard by the roosters in my care. This was similar to what a breeding pair of jungle fowl would experience. Of course, with that kind of freedom and that kind of environment changes in the environment occurred on a daily basis. This just doesn’t happen in coop and run chicken keeping. On an average day I would hear the egg song throughout the day as the hens from various tribes left their tribes to lay their eggs, sometimes in their tribe coops, sometimes in another tribes coops, often in nests on the land perhaps five hundred yards from their tribes coop and territory.

I have heard thousands of egg songs over the ten years and seen thousands of rooster responses and what I saw was what led me to believe that the so called egg song was in fact a call for a rooster and from these observations I wrote a summary article which I published here on BYC.

This thread might give an idea of the level of observation.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/cooperative-behavior.1288804/

Fortunately there were other free range keepers I got to know in Catalonia and the hens call for a rooster was understood and even here on BYC in the reviews and comments on the article I wrote others have witnessed the same behaviour although some were not aware of it’s significance.

So why isn’t the Escort call common knowledge on BYC?

There are lots of reasons. One reason was illustrated by a Catalan chicken keeping friend who when I tried to get him to join the site said to me after reading for a few days “Site is called wrong. It should be called Backyard Hens.”

There is large percentage of members here that don’t keep roosters so they wouldn’t have seen the behaviour under discussion.

They hear the sounds that the hens make and having no other evidence to suggest differently assume the sound is to do with laying the egg, which is only partially correct.

Many of those who do keep roosters do so in a coop and run environment. Why would a rooster in such conditions respond to an escort call when the hen is only a few feet from him, usually in full sight and there are no other roosters that might want to mate with the hen.

This is what I’ve observed with Henry. He rarely bothers doing much more that a token reply to the escort call because he knows exactly where the hen is and knows that there are no other roosters in the vicinity and the run is safe from predators.

The only times I’ve seen Henry respond to the escort call have been when he’s been on the allotments and the hen not in plain sight. He not only answered but went back to the coop to collect the hen.

So here is another point that needs to be taken into account; roosters are not stupid or robots and will make a risk assessment. In the case of confined groups there is no risk in the roosters eyes.

A further factor is roosters tend to respond to their favourite hens. It’s these hens he mates with most and these hens that he hopes will carry his genes forward.

In some keeping conditions the turnover of hens and roosters is so regular that the rooster doesn’t make a bond with any particular hen.

Finally for this discussion most people are not very good at observing their chickens. Often it isn’t the chicken that initially attracts the keepers attention that gives the best clue as to what is going on. Often it’s what the other chickens are doing/do when the event takes place that provides the better answer.

For a great many chicken keepers an hour a day with their chickens out of the coop and run is the amount of time they spend with their chickens bar the feeding and cleaning.

I doubt there is another person on this site that has spent as much time with chickens as I have. Most people have lives outside the world of chickens but for me for a decade my life was chickens and the other farm animals and even now living 6 miles away from the allotments where the chickens are I would bet I spend more time with chickens than the vast majority on this site. I don’t write this as any kind of condemnation of other chicken keepers, more as a statement of fact.

The egg song is in fact an escort call made by a hen for her rooster. The call is most often heard after a hen has laid an egg, but I have heard the same call for hens that have been separated from their tribe, got caught in a fight while crossing another tribes territory and in disputes over who should have nest priority when wanting to lay an egg.

This is so very insightful.

 

[Shadrach]

An example of extensive observation but not quite reaching the right conclusion regarding the egg song. He's seen the events (in bold) but not come to a definite
conclusion.
https://chicken-yard.net/chicken-behavioral-research/

Chicken sounds and vibrations​

One peculiarity of poultry is that they have organs for perceiving vibrations.


These are located predominantly on the legs, but also on the skin.


They feel vibrations of the ground and in the atmosphere, which help them to recognize enemies very quickly. You can notice it if you quietly approach your hen house in the darkness.


Immediately you can hear the warning voice of the rooster.


Since chickens are able to express over 30 different sounds, they also have a very good sense of hearing. This can be observed already with the communication between hen and chick, about 24 hours before hatching out.


The chick chirps with long, high sounds and the hen answers with a deep, soft voice.


Hen and chick can still understand each other at a distance of 20 meters, and the chicken chirps when it gets lost.


At this distance chicks are able to recognize their mother's voice out of a lot of other sounds. When there is food for the chicks or they are allowed to slip under their mother's feathers, they chirp quite softly because they feel good.


The chicks also communicate with each other. But they don't react if any of their brothers and sisters gets lost.


The mother lures her chicks to the food with special sounds.


When the chicks are about 3 - 4 months old the young roosters start to imitate the adults and the young hens try to cackle like hens after having laid an egg. Young roosters without a mother start to crow much later than roosters with a mother, because they are more frightened of the older chickens.


Adult roosters basically crow at 9 o' clock a.m. to demonstrate their power. Light breeds usually have a high voice; heavy breeds a very deep one.


Besides crowing, roosters have a lot of other sounds.


There are for example different warning sounds for an enemy from the air like a big bird and from the ground like a dog.


Just like a hen lures her chicks a rooster lures his hens for the food. Throughout the whole day he also makes other sounds which mean for the hens to follow him.


The hens cackle excitedly when they have laid an egg.


Perhaps they cackle to keep contact to the other chickens, because a rooster immediately comes into the hen house as soon as a hen starts to cackle there.


Sometimes he even flies onto the nest and shows her the way down.


Then he takes her back to the other hens.


But cackling after laying an egg can also make another sense, namely that hens are proud of the thing they produced and that they want to show it to the other hens.


Weaker hens usually cackle less than stronger ones, because they don't want to get trouble with the other, stronger hens.


Sometimes the rooster shows the nest to the hen, by luring her.


But sometimes there seem to be difficulties in understanding if a rooster excitedly tries to show a nest while no hen is around. The reason for this might simply be that he wants to boast.


The same often happens when I bring food to my chickens.


All the hens are already eating and my rooster is the last to arrive.


At once he starts to show the hens the food as if they would not see it...


If hens feel good they utter soft, singing sounds.


It is interesting that our domestic chickens have more sounds available than do the wild living chickens. Besides all those amazing pastimes I wrote about, chickens also find a time to retire a bit.

 

[lightm]

I've got 11 cartons of eggs to sell today (a week's worth from 15 hens, 4 of them over 3 years old, and ignoring the dozen eggs we've eaten), and that's without whatever's laid today
That is a record for me, and I think will do as a conclusion to my little experiment on avoiding commercial feed entirely, from hatch.

The pullets who have never eaten commercial feed survived to maturity better than any before, and are laying better than any pullets I've had before. And the old girls are laying well too.

Would you consider writing an article on it?

 

[Molpet]

The CX sold at our farmer's market are pastured. I would think that is the norm for a farmer's market. Are they not at your market?


Don't you think @HiEverybirdy has paid enough tax for the moment?

They are raised in tractors.... which if your trying to make money, makes sense. They were charging $6 a lb in 2016, last time I bought.
Mine are part CX, running in the poultry yard, so sorta free range pasture. Harvested 16 wks or later. Costs me about $7 a lb... In feed alone.. that's including keeping breeders minus eggs sold or eaten in 2019. Haven't kept track since because it makes me question my sanity

 

[Perris]

The egg song is in fact an escort call made by a hen for her rooster. The call is most often heard after a hen has laid an egg, but I have heard the same call ... in disputes over who should have nest priority when wanting to lay an egg.

This fits with many occasions here, and young roos respond when they're novices, but in due course they all just leave her to sound off, while the current occupants just carry on regardless, and the wannabe occupant baulks her indignation until she can't be bothered anymore, and comes back later or goes to another box in another coop.

 

[pennyJo1960]

I find it very interesting @Shadrach very good read for any and all in my book.