Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Shadrach]

Fret already gave up brooding? Impressive!

Postponed is probably more like it.

 

[Molpet]

Soldering!

IN the plumbing portion of my course.
View attachment 3744445

Looks good

 

[fluffycrow]

Postponed is probably more like it.

Well, a win is a win, even if it is not indefinite

 

[Perris]

Good morning. To answer your question Shad, why I don't agree with the method:
The crop is not a rigid inert plastic box. It’s an elastic, organic sac made of tissues that flex and it receives fluids from somewhere (where exactly if not drunk we have yet to establish, but we can't ignore them) when food is in it. However inconvenient, the relevant measure of its capacity is volume. Further, foodstuffs' properties change in bodies with temperature and time. In most animals digestion starts in the mouth. A problem like sour crop proves microflora/fauna/funga are active in the crop (but are not normally problematic), and pendulous crop proves that stretching goes on (and normally shrinks back).

I don’t understand your motivation actually; rationing food by weight is a commercial practice, not a backyard one, driven by a desire to save money, and designed purely for the convenience of the feeder. Novice BYC users may use the ‘about 120g food per bird per day’ advice as a guide, but personally I can’t see them being bound by it. Frankly, I don’t see much measuring of anything here except coop dimensions, and Americans, who constitute the largest audience, don’t use metric, so anything in grams really won’t mean much to them. So I'm a bit perplexed by the whole exercise.

 

[Perris]

I have never seen stones that size in expelled by a chicken.
I clean the coop every day I'm at the allotments and I look at the droppings, I even give some that look suspect a stir around. If I did see stones that size in the droppings I would be concerned because in my experience what very few stones I have seen in the droppings are less than half a millimeter diameter.

Those are very white urates!

They are pretty typical here. My birds probably have very well developed gizzards, as they're on forage from day 1 and get no UPF so have to do all the food processing themselves. The stones they acquire during foraging resemble the constituents of a local conglomerate stone, which makes sense. I'm sure I read in old handbooks about this periodic purging and recycling of gizzard stones. Most of them are dropped as the birds go about their daily business and they are then washed clean by the rain, to be consumed again by the next bird passing and looking to top up their gizzard.

 

[Perris]

on water, here's a couple of items that readers might find interesting, or fun:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0010wl7
https://www.mashed.com/217934/the-real-reason-you-should-add-water-to-your-whiskey/

 

[Shadrach]

Good morning. To answer your question Shad, why I don't agree with the method:
The crop is not a rigid inert plastic box. It’s an elastic, organic sac made of tissues that flex and it receives fluids from somewhere (where exactly if not drunk we have yet to establish, but we can't ignore them) when food is in it. However inconvenient, the relevant measure of its capacity is volume. Further, foodstuffs' properties change in bodies with temperature and time. In most animals digestion starts in the mouth. A problem like sour crop proves microflora/fauna/funga are active in the crop (but are not normally problematic), and pendulous crop proves that stretching goes on (and normally shrinks back).

I don’t understand your motivation actually; rationing food by weight is a commercial practice, not a backyard one, driven by a desire to save money, and designed purely for the convenience of the feeder. Novice BYC users may use the ‘about 120g food per bird per day’ advice as a guide, but personally I can’t see them being bound by it. Frankly, I don’t see much measuring of anything here except coop dimensions, and Americans, who constitute the largest audience, don’t use metric, so anything in grams really won’t mean much to them. So I'm a bit perplexed by the whole exercise.

Thanks for the reply.
I think I'll let this particular topic sink.

I did have some reservations about publishing the article here on BYC.
I used weight because feed is usually measured by weight and I had hoped that not having to make the conversions from weight to volume would make the article easier to understand.

Writing an article on a reasearch topic that is accessible to the majority of BYC readers I find quite difficult. No worries. I probably won't bother posting the other articles I've written of a similar nature here on BYC.

 

[Shadrach]

Soldering!

IN the plumbing portion of my course.
View attachment 3744445

Pleased to see they do still teach soldering. Most plumbers here in the UK use pre soldered fittings. One just needs to apply heat and the solder already in the fitting flows around the joint.

 

[RoyalChick]

Writing an article on a reasearch topic that is accessible to the majority of BYC readers I find quite difficult. No worries.

I am sure it is hard - but why only cater for the majority?

I probably won't bother posting the other articles I've written of a similar nature here on BYC.

That would be a shame.
I don’t think you should react that way to having your article critiqued by people who are actually engaging on it. That is what peer review is all about.
It may only be a small % of BYC members who can or want to engage - but it is certainly not zero.

 

[Shadrach]

I don’t think you should react that way to having your article critiqued by people who are actually engaging on it.

As I wrote, i had reservations about publishing it anyway. Critique is not a problem.