Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[TropicalChickies]

It is.

The basic shell took six weeks. I did something really stupid at close to the end of the six weeks and went and had a heart attack. I got tossed by a ram and landed badly and according to the doctors this dislodged some internal scar tissue from one of the many breakages I've had in the past and that clotted one of my arteries.
Naturally I was somewhat slower when I got out of hospital and I completed the work in September.

Naturally. Gee whiz. What a gift for understatement. Glad you recovered, sir.

 

[TropicalChickies]

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

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

Ah..thank for these pics. I had seen one picture of the closed fist feeding but obviously I didn't get what it was really about.

I can honestly say I've never met a Sikh I didn't like. I'm not super fond of humans generally, so that's saying a lot.

 

[Brabra]

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.

Just found this thread and was wondering @Shadrach you keep the coop door closed? So that they all line up and wait? I love this idea just wondering how exactly to do it. Thank you!

 

[no fly zone]

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

A little over 4 yrs old

 

[Ladies-Eight]

I'm glad someone pointed this out. I get awfully tired of reading and hearing people moaning about the state of the world as if it all happened in some other universe and got suddenly dumped on us here on earth. We are the generation resposible for whatever state the world is in.
We could have done something. Instead most of us droned on about personal freedom and pursued pesonal wealth at the expense of the less fortunate.
Here in the UK people would rather have a tax cut of a single penny that they can spend of the crap the marketing sells us; most of it we don't need, than raise tax by a penny and fund a decent health service.
Mention that the car, with all it's associations with personal freedom, is helping to destroy our environment and perhaps people might consider arranging their lives so they travel less and use public transport and one may as well have suggested that Jesus was a communist.
We have, according to the propaganda at least been living in a democracy where we can vote for the policies we consider important here in Western society. What did we vote for? More waste, more exploitation, more inequality, more personal freedom which ironically we have even less of now than I recall when I was a lot younger.
We've supported war and division, greed and destruction with our so called democratic rights.
One can't help wondering if the horrible truth is we are not fit to vote and when it comes to what might infringe on what we percieve as what we are entitled to, we will choose the selfsih over the selfless every time.

Pulling out of the system and looking after our

Sometimes our truck does not move for a week.

We do not have public transportation where I live in Florida.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

I think paying for plastic bags was considered in NJ but they went straight to an outright ban.
And I believe paper was also banned because the environmental impact of paper bags is also pretty bad - they need to be reused many times to break even if you see what I mean.
It works fine, we all have reusable bags - although I notice here and in the UK these reusable bags also proliferate and I have no idea if they are made of something recycled. Hope so.
I am still working my way through my mother's stash of plastic bags - I anticipate being offered money for them at some point when I visit the grocery store - I already get looks of shock/surprise/envy when I take them out of my pockets to pack up my groceries!

We don't have to pay for bags for groceries.

There are some sewn ones that you have the option to buy.

I am getting ready to make some grocery bags out of my feed bags (which I don't throw away).

I have used my feed bags as barriers in the coop.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

People I know say they go through four or five straws for one drink when a plastic lasts for who knows how many.
I would say just get one plastic straw and that's it. No need for the paper one if you ever eat out.

I have some metal straws that I keep in my purse.

They don't collapse, fall apart, and my straws don't do any of this.

 

[Molpet]

Sometimes our truck does not move for a week.

We do not have public transportation where I live in Florida.

I have to drive my truck every other week or the battery goes dead. That's with a solar trickle charger in the summer. In winter every week. The SUV I can go 3 wks. I get feed once a month with the SUV, so I can unload it the next day or so depending on how I'm feeling. I use the truck to go to stores. I need it to haul big stuff and plow snow.
I go to the grocery store 2x a month usually

 

[ManueB]

I'm a bit late but chiming in about handling the chickens. I've tried a few times the option of taking a chicken off the roost at night and bring him or her inside, or treat them in the coop if possible, with skittish rooster and hens. While it is efficient, it really, really doesn't help build trust. Imagine being taken off your bed in the dark and being done things to you when you have no control whatsoever.
One of my hen, Caramel, that was relatively human friendly, became totally weary and took to roosting in places we couldn't reach her when we dewormed her for a week in a row with an oral syringe in the coop at night.

Now I try to do that really only as a last solution.Even with my smaller rooster Théo who hates being caught and just hates my gut, I think it feels better to take him by surprise or corner him during the day, than at night when he is utterly vulnerable.

While I don't exactly use Shadrach's technique to hold a chicken, I now put one of my hand under their feet so they can put their weight on it, and it really helps them relax. My partner insisted for me to try and I'm convinced. But if you need to restrain them, it doesn't work.

I have mites in my coop but I'm not sure they are red mites, though they look like it, because they don't act at all like what is usually described. They are visible during the day on smooth surfaces like my plastic food bin, the crate I keep in the coop, and the door. They don't go in the mite traps and I never see them on the roosts or in wood crevices though I check regularly. I also see them outside my coop. I use what poultry sprays I can find here to treat the coop, not permethrin. I would maybe try permethrin if I had an infestation, if I could find it here, and if I could find a way to restrain our cats from going in the coop for a while. I don't think my coop will ever be completely parasite free, being located in a basement in a very old house.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

We have fire ants, so kneeling on the ground to weed and tend to the plants is not an option. We never had raised beds in Vermont, growing up, but we also did not have fire ants.

Cinnamon is a good herb to use to have them move on.

I have fire ants everywhere, and when I sprinkle the Cinnamon over the nest they disappear.

The ants just move to another area.