Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[HiEverybirdy]

I have had several lonely only pullets that went in the nest box with chicken mom when she laid. Around 10 weeks until spring.
I have a turkey hen, good Mama, whose eggs didn't hatch for a couple years. I give her chicks for 2 years that stayed with her until she goes broody the next spring.. they were pullets.
This spring she got 3 chicks and 4 poults that others were ignoring. One turkey hen, who hatched the poults moved in after a couple weeks and took over her poults. One chick was a pullet and a mink got her. The others are cockerels and she is still taking care of them at 15 weeks. The other turkey hen is not pleased that they try to sit by her. Good Mama has to defend them. Not sure how the mink managed it. I'm not sure what is going to happen when I harvest one or both of her cockerels.

Good Mama sounds extraordinary and very dedicated.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

Hunker down and stay safe! Where we are (Upstate SC) we are just getting some much needed rain and cooler temps. So far, we are not even in the tornado-watch zone.

We had some high winds and sheets of rain.

We are fine.

I'd rather deal with a hurricane than a tornado.

 

[Shadrach]

In my view the people who have had the biggest impact on our perception and knowledge on other species behaviour are people like Gerald Durrell and the couple who wrote the book Born Free and others who have lived and breathed the creatures they were interested in rather than the academics who are too busy studying academia. My brother for instance took up university teaching and from that point on, furthering his knowledge through became almost impossible because of the pressures of work, being an academic. Here on NYC there are many people who spend more time observing their chickens in a month than most academics do in their lifetime.

Well, the reason those nuts are insanely expensive here is because the trees do not grow in a humid wet rainforest climate. That's why I'm focusing on growing trees that produce nutritious nuts/seeds appropriate to the climate here.

Anything that a person buys that is imported costs considerably more because transport and distribution is more expensive than growing the actual food. As a cacao farmer (cacao is the base ingredient in chocolate) who also processes and ships a finished product this is something I know a good deal about. Dried cacao beans get a local price of a mere 90 cents per pound on average. By the time they reach a market in the US, Europe, or Japan, the same beans without any further processing will cost $9 - $12 per pound.

Nor do apples grow here. Nor pears, peaches, apricots or figs -- although those fruits do grow higher up in the Andean Sierra. Instead we have papaya, guayaba, many varieties of lemons and oranges, tangerines, pineapple, etc and many fruits Global Northers have never heard of like arazá, borojó, jabicotaba, salak, and inga. We have at least 8 varieties of banana growing on the farm and 5 varieties of plantain, plus yuca (cassava), air potatoes, and taro.

People are often shocked to find out that it's a struggle to grow things like lettuce or onions and you can forget about growing cauliflower or broccoli or brussel sprouts. All of these things require cooler or drier weather the north experiences in spring and fall.

There is abundance here, but it's a very different selection and requires some adjustment of expectations and taste to enjoy.

View attachment 3624189
Jabicotaba (not cherries)
View attachment 3624190
Naranjilla. A tart tomato relative.
View attachment 3624193
Salak. Aka snakefruit
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Breadnut.
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Chicle.

That's an interesting collection of fruit one doesn't see on the supermarket shelves. It's also interesting the impact climate has on what one can grow in a natural environment. It must sound strange given I'm British but I'm still trying to learn what grows here without chemical aid and whithout greenhouses or polly tunnels. The majority of my growing stuff was done in Catalonia under very different circumstances.
By the way, are you sure about the protein content in breadnut. I can't find anything that gives above 9%.

 

[Shadrach]

I did necropsies on several of my girls over the past years that just dropped dead. In all cases it was fatty liver disease. Liver explodes, bird bleeds to death almost instantly.

What did they eat and how were they kept?
There are good fats and not so good fats as I understand it. To further complicate matters there are other foodstuffs not usually found in commercial feed that combat (help burn, so possibly enzymes) a variety of fats.
Then there is of course excersise intensity and time length.
I don't recal Fatty Liver Disease being a problem with chickens kept free range even if they were fed commercial feed. It certainly wasn't an issue with the chickens in Catalonia.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

Phew just caught up on the thread. Fret and all the allotment crew look so happy. It's so lovely to see them all.

My cockerel boys have finally decided to grow up. I've got one who has started to crow (badly) and one who has forgone the crowing in order to fly under the radar and just get the job done with the hens . The unfavored (by senior rooster) hens and pullets don't seem perturbed by their attention. The senior hens still beat the crap out of the boys if they look at them the wrong way.

In sad news I found one of my pullets dead in a nestbox this afternoon. Looks like a classic case of heart attack while laying. She was only 11 months old. Such a shame. Looked to be a quick and painless death however. Nothing at all wrong with her until she died. I'm unsure exactly when she died but I'd think only an hour or two before I found her. She was a big hen, I had to dig a very big hole. I planted a tea bush to mark her grave.

I've not had an instance of that happen in years, not since I was a teenager actually. And that was a very long time ago!

So sorry to hear your pullet just died for no reason.

I have had a couple do that.

 

[Shadrach]

So he is like people on BYC that read something then repeat it without finding out if what they read is valid?

I think that's a problem in general. How does one test validity is the first hurdle for most. The internet has made this more of a problem than it was even if it's just because people have access to a wider range of topics and opinions than they did when the printed word was the main route of information access. On many topics, the current fashion is to favour lots of opinions and the reader has to pick by some means which opinion seems most credible. In theory this should work well in an educated population but even then some truely ridiculous opinions get established as facts.

 

[Shadrach]

I don't think it's possible to sequence genomes in the field. Lab work is research.

Yes, lab work is research but he doesn't do much of that apparently; his team do all that stuff.

 

[Shadrach]

I have had several lonely only pullets that went in the nest box with chicken mom when she laid. Around 10 weeks until spring.
I have a turkey hen, good Mama, whose eggs didn't hatch for a couple years. I give her chicks for 2 years that stayed with her until she goes broody the next spring.. they were pullets.
This spring she got 3 chicks and 4 poults that others were ignoring. One turkey hen, who hatched the poults moved in after a couple weeks and took over her poults. One chick was a pullet and a mink got her. The others are cockerels and she is still taking care of them at 15 weeks. The other turkey hen is not pleased that they try to sit by her. Good Mama has to defend them. Not sure how the mink managed it. I'm not sure what is going to happen when I harvest one or both of her cockerels.

Perhaps turkey broodies care for their chicks longer in nature and that is the explantation.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

Ex Batts good afternoon one and all!

The hurricane is gone.

Temperature is in the 80s.

Have a great day!

 

[MaryJanet]

My brother for instance took up university teaching and from that point on, furthering his knowledge through became almost impossible because of the pressures of work, being an academic.

It's true that society asks a lot of its universities and academics. External boards and committees, internal boards and committees, supervision of doctoral students, teaching and inspiring 100s of undergrads at once, recruiting and coordinating large teams of sessional teaching staff, supervision of capstone projects, writing, research, winning grants, publishing papers, editing journals, reviewing papers for other journals, organising conferences, following up on those few undergrads who cheat instead of embracing learning. All while maintaining ethical professionalism and while juggling timezones and travel commitments. It's all in a day's work. Or rather, a month's work.

Then there are the toxicities that creep into such a high pressure environment. Usually rivalry caused by envy leading to shady behaviour or the withholding of opportunity. For example, I have often heard people in STEM ridiculing research in the humanities. Why do people in STEM consider themselves qualified to judge? Were their degrees or PhDs in the humanities? No? Then they have no grounds on which to assess work conducted in the humanities.

On the other hand, there's often a lot of cordiality among disciplinary research colleagues who are based at other universities.

My point is that a scholarly life is demanding in ways that are not obvious to outsiders. If you haven't lived it, don't judge it.