Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Shadrach]

I used to be almost that clueless. At least she's thinking of them I suppose?

It seems to me that you have been "dumped on" Shad. All of the responsibility and none of the benefits.
Any chance of you getting official "ownership" of the chooks and their area. I worry that you'll get them all sorted then have the rug pulled out from under you.

C has some issues which unfortunately end up meaning the chickens have to deal with them as well as people. I volunteered for this. Yep, no doubt C is taking the piss. It's what people do ime.
The thread is mostly a diary with some interesting information in it I hope. I'm not really interested in C, they are just an irritation I have to deal with. They can't help what they are I expect. There are lots of posts from similar here on BYC.

 

[LaFleche]

In case C mentions or even complains about a decrease in egg production, this would be the moment for you @Shadrach to convince her, that with the right kind and amount of chicken feed the production will go up and be steady.

 

[Shadrach]

We got no advice at all from the battery, and I'm afraid I made it sound like a fairy tale and gave us the good role but in fact we got so many things wrong. All our knowledge was based on my partner's memories of how his grandmother kept hens when a was a child (we are living in her house).

Here are some of our mistakes and some of the hard stuff our hens went through :
-food : when we got the pullets they were already on layer feed although they were little more than two months old. We thought it would be a good idea to keep them on the same stuff, because it was produced by the battery (on their own land and mill) ...so we bought 80 kilos. Turns out it was full of gross stuff( colourings, flavourings) , it had a three months life date, and anyway the pullets were too young for it. It probably forced them into laying too early.
- the other food mistake we made because of grandma's memory, was cook them all our potatoes that were too small or too shabby for human consumption. They must have eaten about a hundred kilo the first winter. Once I learnt better it was hard to convince my partner that maybe we shouldn't do this exactly as grandma did.
- our coop is awful. It's a vaulted cellar in our old house, it used to be a barn then turned into a coop in the 1930's, has an earth floor, is so dusty and old that I thought we could never keep animals in there. We didn't know about ventilation so the first winter we closed the double doors every night and left the water in the coop, trapping all the moisture inside. We use our harvested hay as bedding because our place is only accessible on foot and there is no way we could bring a sufficient amount of straw or wood chips for a 15 M2 coop.
- Regarding health troubles our hen Vanille has had troubles laying ever since she started. I can not count the times we thought she would die. Two other hens began having occasional difficulties in their second years. One of them has days when she will scream when she lays almost like a pregnant woman. I feel so helpless, we have tried changing their feed, adding calcium supplement, nothing is really effective. It's just on and off without us understanding what's going on.
- The bantams introduction was a psychological catastrophe. Almost two months after one of our hens is still so angry and distressed that she is literally making herself sick. All of our hens will retain laying if the bantams are in the coop at the time they want to lay so they are all getting egg bound one after the other. (The bantam lady of course only wants to lay in the coop and love watching the standards trying to lay. )

So yes they do have a good life on the whole because they have quite a lot of space and are outside all day but if we had been given sound advice before things would have been smoother. Probably we would have gotten just two ex batts and other hens from a farm.

Some tax that show the other side of the fairy tale . Vanille when she spent a month in a cage in September sick and molting.

View attachment 2965499

Very interesting reading about your experiences with Ex Batts and others.

 

[Shadrach]

In case C mentions or even complains about a decrease in egg production, this would be the moment for you @Shadrach to convince her, that with the right kind and amount of chicken feed the production will go up and be steady.

Unfortunately trying to convince people about anything to do with chickens that doesn't suit them is a waste of time. It's about that step again that needs to be taken by most people in accepting that chickens are not there to be exploited and mistreated.

 

[Shadrach]

More chicken pornography. Henry asked 9 that I saw and mated with 7.

 

[Shadrach]

A bit of pale sunshine again this evening. I was late. I'm in the process of moving and had to wait for a delivery. I did get a couple of decent pictures though.

No glue, honest!

Cloud. Even she is getting a lot less nervous of me.

Got both sides covered!

 

[alwaystj9]

Excellent set of pictures!

 

[Sortacountrychicken]

Lovely pictures .

The family method for feeding chickens that I was raised on is that they are fed whole oats and any scraps that come out of the kitchen. It differed farm to farm if the chickens were free range or not. The farms that had large gardens, the chickens were run in fenced runs on grass. If there were enough chickens to run down all the grass, you moved the fence. My chickens get an all flock feed but they don't eat much of it if there are live plants and bugs to hunt down.

 

[pennyJo1960]

We where out most the day .. Went out to scrape tables say hi to the birds ... We did the covid boosters today ..
Birds met me at the gate stayed right around my feet as cleaned the tables they roost on.

 

[Perris]

I'm in the process of moving and had to wait for a delivery.

does your new place have land? will you be able to start your own flock again?