Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[MaryJanet]

And now for something different...

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/is-this-the-proletariat

In case the link gets missed...

What an astute man and fascinating artist. I didn't expect to enjoy the second video as much as I did. His views on religion and art are fascinating, but the thought that really captured my mind was what he called the dance of the universe. People are very good at organising and establishing vast disciplining systems for supporting life and taming nature in some way (banking, healthcare, schooling etc) and these systems distract us, maybe even prevent us, from observing the dance of the universe. In another post somewhere I commented that the hens at my house have become the key to a sort of mildly meditative daily habit that takes me as close to the dance of the universe as I can get (without going to and being in the liminal space of a beachfront) because they connect me to sunrise and sunset as an indication of time and season.

 

[MaryJanet]

It's not an easy problem.
The old school writers and keepers I have a great deal of respect for recommend learning to handle the chickens., both male and female. The reasoning behind this is one should inspect the chickens one keeps as basic good animal husbandry. If one can't inspect them then one doesn't know if they have problems until they show obvious signs of ill health and often this is too late to take remedial action.
The vast majority of chickens (don't bother making a post about how much your chickens love you and adore being picked up. Any creature that likes being picked up by it's number one predator isn't right in the head ) don't like being handled. Some are more tolerant of it than others.

The ideal in my opinion is to be able to do the basic checks (vent, back of neck and under wings) without taking the chicken off the ground and this approach has worked best for me with both males and females. You may have noticed pictures of me doing this on this thread and others.

What chickens particulalry dislike is having their wings immobilized. So learning to pick chickens up by getting them to stand on your hand with their wings free until such time one needs to constrain them is worth learning. I think MJ and a couple of others have found this usefull when taking chickens off roost bars. It works for me and many others. I put the allotment chickens in the coop at night using this technique.

Chickens inspect and groom other chickens and this is always done on the ground or on a roost bar. I introduced waiting roost bars as I call them with the tribes for the more standoffish tribe members on the advice of a Catalan chicken keeping friend.

Here is one example.
View attachment 3545454
At roost time the chickens wait on the outside woodwork for their turn to enter the coop and while they are there it gives the keeper an ideal opportunity to have a look at legs feet and the underside. I have a roost bar outside the allotment coop and as you will have seen, the chickens get on this before going into the coop, with or without my encouragement.

For the novice to chicken inspections, getting the chicken off the roost bar at night is favourite. You'll need a good headtorch. They tend to stay in one place, especially if it's high off the ground (coop roofs work well if you have the right sort of coop).

For keepers with large walk in coops, inspection in the coop is easiest. The chickens aren't carried off to somewhere strange and in general stay calm.

With males, I've done handling them when young which they get used to and handling them as little as possible. I haven't noticed one way or the other leads to aggressive behaviour. What I did get were lifelong friends with those I handled a lot which can be as bigger problem as being standoffish.

The important thing is one must be able to inspect the chickens. I do a basic inspection daily on one or more at the allotments. I used to do a couple a week from each tribe in Catalonia and at the farm in Hertfordshire we did batch inspections daily but it was alot less considerate than the practice I have now due to the numbers involved.

I can't stress enough how imporatn it is to do these inspections; crop and vent checks and at least one body area every day if one can. Along with these a white tissue wipe along the underside of the roost bars in the coop every few days can and will save a lot of small problems turning into a major crisis.

Learning how to lift a chicken without grabbing it changed everything because the chickens started trusting me more.

 

[Shadrach]

Warm and sticky and the rain didn't arrive here. It's forcast for tomorrow in the guise of storms. We shall see.
It seems C decided to feed the chickens this morning. They must have woken up to one of those rare days of reality and decided to do something. Pellets all over the ground, some bird seed on the ground as well. No wonder we get rats.
We all got out on to the allotments. I had another go at Ella's bum. There were a few lumps that had set like concrete but I got a lot more off managing to break the lumps with my finger nails and crushing the remainder by rolling the feathers between my fingers. I would, should warn water and a suitable tub be a practical proposition at the allotments bath her rear end. The stuff that has dripped under her belly is painfull being close to the skin when being removed. She was very good and looked as if she felt better for the cleaning. Not the most pleasant job.

I mentioned earlier that I had a friend staying at the flat. He's as mad about chickens as I am. Naturally we talked a lot about chickens and I mentioned despite having a plastic coop there was a red mite problem. He uses a blow torch like I did in Catalonia and was a bit suprised when I said I was using chemicals. As he pointed out, all the wooden roost bar arrangement comes out of the coop easily and I could torch this outside the coop. He also pointed out that recycled plastic can take quite a lot of heat before it deforms so I could, being prcticed with blow torch cleaning, do the seams with the torch as well. I took my stupid hat off this morning and ordered a blow torch.
While on the subject he mentioned that he has helped out a couple of people he knows where he lives with their chickens and he said, despite the availibility of mite information, the people he has helped out have no idea if their coops have mites living in them and if they have, the mites usually only get dicovered when the keeper either sees some on the bird, or more usually, on their hands/clothing after handing a chicken. They then they throw a load of DE around the coop and believe the problem sorted. My friend turns up and shows them where the mites are hiding. Of course, being 2023 and lots of people reluctant to use chemicals, let alone a blow torch, the mites continue to feed off the chickens.

This explains the red mite life cycle.
https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/livestock/poultry/chicken_mite.htm
Note that an adult female lays 4 to 8 eggs and the life cycle from egg to adult is about seven days. That is some exponential population growth rate.
What is rarely made clear is DE and chemical treatments, if they work at all, only kill from larva to adult; not the eggs. A blow torch fries the eggs as well as the mobile mites.

I took out both roosts and the roost supports three days ago and sprayed them thoroughly with Nettex. I also scraped along the roost bars to remove with a sharp paint scraper. You can see in one of the pictures below a thin line of dust and dead mite debris. I also sprayed the plastic in the coop just in case there were mobile mites who hadn't gone to hide yet. They cant lay eggs on the plastic so only live mites will be on the plasic surfaces. I did a good job. There is no doubt that the Nettex works. You can see the mites drop dead as they come into contact with it and here's the point, for any treatment to work the mite has to come into contact with the chosen method, except for the blow torch whose heat will kill without the flame even touching the mite.

I've been doing the white tissue test at night about half an hour after the chickens have gone to roost. It's very easy to do. Take a white tissue and fold it as you can see in the picture. Fold it so it is a bit wider than the underside of the roost bar. In this instance I spray the tissue with Nettex so if there are mites on the roost bar they die as I wipe. If the white tissue shows any red dots or grey/blackish dots there are mites in the coop. If you can wait an hour after roost time you'll get a better result. It seems some mites oversleep and miss early dinner.

These are pictures from today. Three days after a very thorough clean and chemical mite kill. Every piece of endgrain had mites in various stages of development and feeding status! Not many but at their exponential breeding rate in a few days the coop will be crawling with them.
As you can see, one could throw a metric, or imperial ton of DE at the problem and it won't work because a) the DE wont stick to the underside of the roost bars and b) it wont get into the end grain even if one has dismantled the roost bars. Of course, it won't kill the eggs either.

So, this is a small, easy to clean plastic coop, the only woodwork where a mite can live being the roost bars. Imagine how near to impossible it is to rid some massive walk in coop built out of wood with mite welcoming end grain everywhere one looks. This is why people burn coops. It's not just people being hysterical. That is all one can do once an infestation has take place.

This is what the mites look like.

This is after being sprayed with Nettex.

The other roost bar.

Scraping the roost bars showing the line of debris I mentioned.

What I've found in the past is once the roost bar ends are full up the mites migrate to the next nearest endgrain to their dinner, the chickens. I've found mites two feet away from the nearest roost bar in the past. They will travel for supper.

Most infestations happen in warm dry weather so one needs to be especially vigilant in such conditions.

I didn't get around to finding the pictures I have of fist feeding so I took a couple more for @TropicalChickies. This is how it's done. It stops the smash and grab feeding and will save your hands from being pecked by the greedy little sweethearts. It may take a couple of goes but it works a treat.

Finally because I was bored and had half an hour to wait for a bus, this is what I see from the village bus stop. The shop that's open accross the road is run by a Sikh family who must have the patience of saints given the nature of their customers who are generally white racists rednecks who fall out of the two pubs you can see in the pictures to buy a few cans to take home. They are lovely people who work from dawn to late seven days a week. Tonight, being Friday night was Karaoke night in one of the pubs so I've endured some of the worst singing imaginable during my wait.

 

[Shadrach]

What an astute man and fascinating artist. I didn't expect to enjoy the second video as much as I did. His views on religion and art are fascinating, but the thought that really captured my mind was what he called the dance of the universe. People are very good at organising and establishing vast disciplining systems for supporting life and taming nature in some way (banking, healthcare, schooling etc) and these systems distract us, maybe even prevent us, from observing the dance of the universe. In another post somewhere I commented that the hens at my house have become the key to a sort of mildly meditative daily habit that takes me as close to the dance of the universe as I can get (without going to and being in the liminal space of a beachfront) because they connect me to sunrise and sunset as an indication of time and season.

He's a very interesting man and like his artwork.

 

[Perris]

On the mites, that's the first and principal reason why I went for a Nestera coop: the coop comes apart easily and completely into individual flat pieces and can be washed; I go over each surface with a (plastic) scourer and dish soap if I just wet and rinse rather than use the power washer (to reduce water consumption), as yesterday. No nooks or crannies left, no chemicals (other than saponifiers, which help the bone dry ground absorb the water runoff) or fire needed.

As it happens I've been working through them this last week, and I disassembled the last one yesterday to clean before the weather breaks, and the mites in all of them have been hiding behind the circular vents (which disassemble with one wing nut screw) - that's why I warned you about any modifications you make to your un-disassemble-able (ugh, dreadful word, but what's needed here) coop would create new hiding places for mites. I hope it withstands whatever heat you plan on throwing at it.

When reassembling, I smear vaseline on the roost ends and to plug the holes where they sit in the plastic sides, and it acts like a glue trap for any mites coming that way.

 

[BDutch]

Warm and sticky and the rain didn't arrive here. It's forcast for tomorrow in the guise of storms. We shall see.
It seems C decided to feed the chickens this morning. They must have woken up to one of those rare days of reality and decided to do something. Pellets all over the ground, some bird seed on the ground as well. No wonder we get rats.
We all got out on to the allotments. I had another go at Ella's bum. There were a few lumps that had set like concrete but I got a lot more off managing to break the lumps with my finger nails and crushing the remainder by rolling the feathers between my fingers. I would, should warn water and a suitable tub be a practical proposition at the allotments bath her rear end. The stuff that has dripped under her belly is painfull being close to the skin when being removed. She was very good and looked as if she felt better for the cleaning. Not the most pleasant job.
View attachment 3546034View attachment 3546033View attachment 3546032View attachment 3546031View attachment 3546030View attachment 3546029View attachment 3546028View attachment 3546027View attachment 3546026View attachment 3546025View attachment 3546023View attachment 3546022

I mentioned earlier that I had a friend staying at the flat. He's as mad about chickens as I am. Naturally we talked a lot about chickens and I mentioned despite having a plastic coop there was a red mite problem. He uses a blow torch like I did in Catalonia and was a bit suprised when I said I was using chemicals. As he pointed out, all the wooden roost bar arrangement comes out of the coop easily and I could torch this outside the coop. He also pointed out that recycled plastic can take quite a lot of heat before it deforms so I could, being prcticed with blow torch cleaning, do the seams with the torch as well. I took my stupid hat off this morning and ordered a blow torch.
While on the subject he mentioned that he has helped out a couple of people he knows where he lives with their chickens and he said, despite the availibility of mite information, the people he has helped out have no idea if their coops have mites living in them and if they have, the mites usually only get dicovered when the keeper either sees some on the bird, or more usually, on their hands/clothing after handing a chicken. They then they throw a load of DE around the coop and believe the problem sorted. My friend turns up and shows them where the mites are hiding. Of course, being 2023 and lots of people reluctant to use chemicals, let alone a blow torch, the mites continue to feed off the chickens.

This explains the red mite life cycle.
https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/livestock/poultry/chicken_mite.htm
Note that an adult female lays 4 to 8 eggs and the life cycle from egg to adult is about seven days. That is some exponential population growth rate.
What is rarely made clear is DE and chemical treatments, if they work at all, only kill from larva to adult; not the eggs. A blow torch fries the eggs as well as the mobile mites.

I took out both roosts and the roost supports three days ago and sprayed them thoroughly with Nettex. I also scraped along the roost bars to remove with a sharp paint scraper. You can see in one of the pictures below a thin line of dust and dead mite debris. I also sprayed the plastic in the coop just in case there were mobile mites who hadn't gone to hide yet. They cant lay eggs on the plastic so only live mites will be on the plasic surfaces. I did a good job. There is no doubt that the Nettex works. You can see the mites drop dead as they come into contact with it and here's the point, for any treatment to work the mite has to come into contact with the chosen method, except for the blow torch whose heat will kill without the flame even touching the mite.

I've been doing the white tissue test at night about half an hour after the chickens have gone to roost. It's very easy to do. Take a white tissue and fold it as you can see in the picture. Fold it so it is a bit wider than the underside of the roost bar. In this instance I spray the tissue with Nettex so if there are mites on the roost bar they die as I wipe. If the white tissue shows any red dots or grey/blackish dots there are mites in the coop. If you can wait an hour after roost time you'll get a better result. It seems some mites oversleep and miss early dinner.

These are pictures from today. Three days after a very thorough clean and chemical mite kill. Every piece of endgrain had mites in various stages of development and feeding status! Not many but at their exponential breeding rate in a few days the coop will be crawling with them.
As you can see, one could throw a metric, or imperial ton of DE at the problem and it won't work because a) the DE wont stick to the underside of the roost bars and b) it wont get into the end grain even if one has dismantled the roost bars. Of course, it won't kill the eggs either.

So, this is a small, easy to clean plastic coop, the only woodwork where a mite can live being the roost bars. Imagine how near to impossible it is to rid some massive walk in coop built out of wood with mite welcoming end grain everywhere one looks. This is why people burn coops. It's not just people being hysterical. That is all one can do once an infestation has take place.

This is what the mites look like.
View attachment 3546148
This is after being sprayed with Nettex.
View attachment 3546100
The other roost bar.
View attachment 3546101
Scraping the roost bars showing the line of debris I mentioned.
View attachment 3546103View attachment 3546102View attachment 3546104

What I've found in the past is once the roost bar ends are full up the mites migrate to the next nearest endgrain to their dinner, the chickens. I've found mites two feet away from the nearest roost bar in the past. They will travel for supper.

Most infestations happen in warm dry weather so one needs to be especially vigilant in such conditions.

I didn't get around to finding the pictures I have of fist feeding so I took a couple more for @TropicalChickies. This is how it's done. It stops the smash and grab feeding and will save your hands from being pecked by the greedy little sweethearts. It may take a couple of goes but it works a treat.
View attachment 3546166
View attachment 3546167

Finally because I was bored and had half an hour to wait for a bus, this is what I see from the village bus stop. The shop that's open accross the road is run by a Sikh family who must have the patience of saints given the nature of their customers who are generally white racists rednecks who fall out of the two pubs you can see in the pictures to buy a few cans to take home. They are lovely people who work from dawn to late seven days a week. Tonight, being Friday night was Karaoke night in one of the pubs so I've endured some of the worst singing imaginable during my wait.
View attachment 3546181
View attachment 3546179View attachment 3546182

Thanks for pointing out how you handle a mite infestation.
Of course I was curious about the Nettex (oil with permethrin) you advice to use.

---

Nettex page with info and tips for mite control : https://www.nettexpoultry.com/products/mite-and-pest-control/total-mite-kill-ready-to-use-spray/

• Kills mites, lice and other crawling insects.
• Formulated with an oily base, which penetrates deep into cracks and crevices of housing.
• Ready to use formulation.
• Contains Permethrin.

Open the link for the tips for cleaning and maintenance to avoid the return of the red mite infestation. Cleaning out the entire coop is first thing to do of course whatever you use to try to kill the lice.

---

They don’t sell it here but they might sell something similar.
As you know I do use diatomaceous earth (DE), and it sticks to all surfaces if you make a simple paint with DE. Take a bowl and a painters brush. Put about ¾ volume DE and ¼ volume water in it. I use the brush to mix it. When its too thin to paint, add more DE. Too thick to paint? Add water.
You can paint the whole roost, underneath as well. And in every crack or joint and where the roost is attached to the wall I smear the DE paint twice.
Further on I mix it with sand for a layer under the bedding in the nest boxes. (stick to shavings only now). And mix DE through the sand in the area’s where the chickens take a sand bath.

I think I got red mites in the nest boxes because of the chicks and I used too much bedding. Only found lice in a red mite control roll in the nest box. And one tiny red mite on one of the adult roosts. Monitoring is very important to be able to get into action before the problem gets huge.

In the Netherlands the professionals (factory farming) use DE spray too. After the chickens have gone to the slaughter house they clean the stable and spray DE (with water) on all surfaces. After drying they let the new crowd in. They choose DE because most poisons are not allowed (eggs / meat) and the natural poison Permethrin, that breaks down easily, isn’t effective anymore (resistance).

 

[Perris]

surely professionals in NL following the standard and recommended 'all in all out' farming method don't have to worry about eggs or meat while the shed is empty, and do have to use a govt/EU approved disinfectant that's powerful enough to destroy H5N1, among other things, while the shed's empty? That is definitely required practice here - on legacy EU legislation (as DEFRA haven't got round to changing it yet, in typical glacial fashion).
e.g. "Clean up and disinfection. Bacteria and viruses can survive in environments for a long time. After flock depletion, houses have to be cleaned and disinfected carefully, to prevent contamination with pathogens from the previous flock." from a NL breeders guide.

 

[Shadrach]

On the mites, that's the first and principal reason why I went for a Nestera coop: the coop comes apart easily and completely into individual flat pieces and can be washed; I go over each surface with a (plastic) scourer and dish soap if I just wet and rinse rather than use the power washer (to reduce water consumption), as yesterday. No nooks or crannies left, no chemicals (other than saponifiers, which help the bone dry ground absorb the water runoff) or fire needed.

As it happens I've been working through them this last week, and I disassembled the last one yesterday to clean before the weather breaks, and the mites in all of them have been hiding behind the circular vents (which disassemble with one wing nut screw) - that's why I warned you about any modifications you make to your un-disassemble-able (ugh, dreadful word, but what's needed here) coop would create new hiding places for mites. I hope it withstands whatever heat you plan on throwing at it.

When reassembling, I smear vaseline on the roost ends and to plug the holes where they sit in the plastic sides, and it acts like a glue trap for any mites coming that way.

I did heed your warning but I didn't have much choice about the roost bars. I have checked the circular adjustable vents and they're mite free. No doubt the Nestera coops are a better design as I've mentioned in the post I made on the competition thread.
What really irritates me is if C had rehomed some of the chickens when I suggested getting a new coop I would have bought the largest of the Nestera coops.
Needless to write I'll be testing the effect of the blow torch on a scrap piece of the plastic I've cut out.
Ideally I would like the roost bars to have their ends fitted through the coop wall and exposed to the light. I did this on some of the tribe's coops and it worked well. It's just not a sensible option with this coop.
This dry spell I guess will have been responsible for a red mite problems for a lot of keepers.

 

[TropicalChickies]

Poor Skeksis is not feeling well. We suspect egg yolk perodontis. Got some of the appropriate meds in her. Hope she improves.
View attachment 3545876

Ohhh... I hope she gets better. How old is she?

 

[TropicalChickies]

And now for something different...

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/is-this-the-proletariat

In case the link gets missed...

Really interesting work. I'll listen to the interview today while in town. Looking at the images here, my first thought was "it kinda looks like Diego Rivera went to an International Mr. Leather show" -- which is sort of an annual pageant/meet up for burly gay men who enjoy wearing fetish attire. I was living in Chicago and a popular health club where I worked hosted the event one year. Then I was reminded of those wonderfully creepy paintings and etchings n the Prado in Madrid. But there's a gritty working class tone to this work I like -- like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar named Desire, and also those great Stalin era Soviet propaganda posters... A lot of influences, but really original work