Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[MaryJanet]

A week or two ago I filled the bird silo for my chickens with a grain mixture / scratch. It has all kind of whole grans and a little cracked corns.
Because they had from eat it a lot,I didn’t refill immediately. The weather was quite nasty here last week and some grains at the bottom the chickens couldn’t get out, got wet.
Yesterday I refilled, the whole grains had sprouted. Emptying the silo I made my chickens very happy .

They loved the grain sprouts. Maybe I should soak some scratch to sprout (inside the house) as a healthy treat for the chickens if they stop going out completely.

They hardly come outside nowadays for fresh vitamins. It seems as if ree ranging is not in their vocabulary anymore.
This photo was taken in the minute they are outside after opening the coop and run door. They choose to go back inside again after a few - max 10 minutes.
.
View attachment 3677845

My hens have also reduced their free ranging time recently. Some mornings they're too busy eating breakfast/snoozing/grooming/harrassing the young broodies to come out. Sometimes they request free ranging in the afternoon, but not always.

It is a very big run for 7 hens, full of things to do, food, water, nesting options, and it has more shade than ever before.

 

[TropicalChickies]

A week or two ago I filled the bird silo for my chickens with a grain mixture / scratch. It has all kind of whole grans and a little cracked corns.
Because they had from eat it a lot,I didn’t refill immediately. The weather was quite nasty here last week and some grains at the bottom the chickens couldn’t get out, got wet.
Yesterday I refilled, the whole grains had sprouted. Emptying the silo I made my chickens very happy .

They loved the grain sprouts. Maybe I should soak some scratch to sprout (inside the house) as a healthy treat for the chickens if they stop going out completely.

They hardly come outside nowadays for fresh vitamins. It seems as if ree ranging is not in their vocabulary anymore.
This photo was taken in the minute they are outside after opening the coop and run door. They choose to go back inside again after a few - max 10 minutes.
.
View attachment 3677845

When I only had hens, they would get like that sometimes. They were never in a run, but they would exit their coop in the morning and spend almost the entire day not 10 feet from my kitchen door under a tree. Then one day they snapped out of it and started roaming around more. Perhaps there was some predator lurking around that I never saw. Anyway, now that there are two roosters and a bigger group overall, the adults range out fairly far, the juvies stay closer.

 

[Sally PB]

I wonder if there is any correlation between incubator hatched and human raised to nest box roosting or late to use a bar.

Here's what I have experienced. All three batches of my chicks were incubator chicks, all three brooded by me in the house.

Group 1 (3 pullets, 1 cockerel): I put a 1" diameter dowel in the brooder at about 2 weeks. (Brooder is a dog crate, so I put the dowel through the openings and secured it.) All the chickens liked sitting on the dowel, and all took to roosting in the coop when they moved outside.

Group 2 (3 pullet chicks): Same treatment. They roosted sometimes on the roost with Group 1, sometimes on the poop board below the roost. These birds are 2 and 3 years old now.

Group 3 (5 pullet chicks): I didn't use the dowel (couldn't find it ). I made a new roost, a copy of the other one (which is crowded with the senior birds). Nobody uses it. The pullets have a different small roost that 3 use, sometimes a 4th. The remaining bird(s) is on the floor nearby. It's not always the same 3 or 4. I had to put something in the corner where they had been making their "Cuddle pile," as it was difficult to reach (especially for my chicken sitter while I'm gone). They seemed to want to be on a roost; the adults would not share. That's why I made the second roost, so that everyone would have plenty of room.

When I get back home from vacation, I'm going to dismantle the new roost and use the material to make a different configuration. It would be nice if the pullets would use it, as where they're roosting now is awkward to keep clean.

Nobody sleeps in the nest box except for a heavily molting hen (not always the same one). When they look like porcupines, I don't care if they sleep in the nest box.

 

[Molpet]

They hardly come outside nowadays for fresh vitamins. It seems as if ree ranging is not in their vocabulary anymore.

mine have been under cover because of hawks. I picked up a bunch of pumpkins and had to move them to where the birds were hiding under trees and such so they would eat them

 

[Shadrach]

The current grain/seed mix I've settled on for awhile now is roughly(per 100g)
17% protein
11% fat
72% carbohydrate

I mix it myself from maize, wheat berries, cracked rice, oats, quinoa, flax seeds, and sunflower seeds. Soak to ferment. To serve, I scoop out enough for the 12 chickens I'm feeding now (roughly 600g per meal drained). I did weigh initially, now I just eyeball it. I stir in a scoop (about 80g) of yellow split pea flour to each meal batch right before serving. I feed them this 2x per day. The macronutrient counts above include the split pea flour which ups the protein content. The flax and sunflower seeds up the fat content. I agree that 5% is low -- but the feed industry probably isn't focused on chickens that get ample exercise. Perhaps a higher fat diet leads to (or is believed to lead to) more disease in sedentary/confined chickens. Like people.

The feed mix described above is what the chickens know they will get every day in some amount. However, I mix it up for them based on whatever I've cooked during the week. They also eat boiled plantains and yuca, sweet potato, rice, and well-cooked legumes. Twice a week, they get beef boiled off the bones and rice cooked in the marrow broth. My chickens scoff at raw vegetables (they prefer grass and wild plants), but they like cooked carrots, squash, and especially beets.

I have to admit that as I've seen everyone thriving since the transition to homemade feed six months ago, I've become less obsessive about measuring everything I give them to eat. I see them catching and eating grasshoppers, frogs, small lizards, even snakes. They dig out reptile eggs and scarf down frog eggs like caviar. I've come to see the food I provide for them as a good foundation of daily calories and with the added benefit of stability for their mental well-being, but the food itself will likely never be as essential as what they forage.

My current circumstances are different. The chickens are confined to their run for approximately two thirds of the daylight hours. While the forage on the allotments is probably good, the time to do it is limited.
The tribes used to get ged commercial feed in the morning and then they went foraging. The morning forage looked to be the most concentrated of the day; some days two and a hlf hours with the hens eating while the males stood guard.
They did come back out for a top up some days at around mid day, but generally after the morning forage they tended to stay under cover and not venture out much until two to three hours before dusk. The evening forage was lightweight compared to the mornings and they got fed commercial feed and then their treat food for the day.
The allotment chickens generally miss out on the main morning forage. Currently I leave around 80 grams of commercial feed and water in the coop overnight. The the auto door opening an hour and a half after dawn in which time they can eat before leaving the coop. How it gets shared out I don't know but hopefully those that are hungry get at least some food in the morning.

I'll be interested to see how the latest mix ferments and the chickens reaction to it. I need to be reasonably confident I've got ball-court correct percentages right before I stop feeding any commercial feed because of the time they are contained. With free rangers, assuming space and diverse vegitation, non of this was a problem.

 

[Shadrach]

Four hours today, Mostly sunny in the afternoon.

Eating with the gate shut while I watch who eats what. What often happens is once the seniors have eaten and no longer drive the juniors away from the bowls the seniors want to be out while the juniors are still catching up on the eating. Generally I've seen a preference to being with group/tribe rather than carrying on eating. This can mean the juniors don't get enough to eat at a critical stage in their growth. Keeping them all together until everyone leaves the bowls is what I'm doing currently.
They all prefer the new grower pellets. Carbon spend about the same amount of time eating but gets more nutrition per peck than she did with the dry crumble and hopefully a decent balance. She didn't like the chick mash.
Henry defintely approved.

They all seemed to like the new birdseed and grain mix. The roasted buckwheat got left to Dig and Mow. The chopped brazil nut (just one) got eaten early. They like the better quality wheat. It even looks better quality. I didn't quite see what happened to the red millet or the pin head oats. I couldn't really tracke the rest of the ingredients.

 

[Perris]

Keep watching; their tastes may change over the next couple of weeks as the novelties wear off and nutritional needs change.

 

[Perris]

The tribes used to get ged commercial feed in the morning and then they went foraging. The morning forage looked to be the most concentrated of the day; some days two and a hlf hours with the hens eating while the males stood guard.
They did come back out for a top up some days at around mid day, but generally after the morning forage they tended to stay under cover and not venture out much until two to three hours before dusk. The evening forage was lightweight compared to the mornings and they got fed commercial feed and then their treat food for the day.

This is similar to but not the same as the pattern here. My lot have breakfast and then retire to a comfortable spot to digest for an hour or two (the youngsters and sub roo form a second sitting of breakfast, and join them in due course). Then the foraging starts mid morning till lunchtime, usually as a consolidated flock as they emerge from the post-prandial snooze or dust bath, and breaking into smaller groups and individuals as they each decide where they want to go for whatever it is they're looking for. The afternoons are spent dozing, unless it was raining in the morning, in which case the foraging gets going whenever there's a dry spell. Then they're all hovering round the feeding station at tea time, which follows the same pattern as breakfast except that, unless it's pouring with rain, they'll all add some grass and other lawn forage en route to the coops. Some will stop to graze even if it's pouring down. On days that it rains all day long they all choose to forage in it for some time rather than stay in the dry and skip it.

Broodies have their chicks on a stronger regime of forage/rest all day long, and seem to work systematically round the garden; I think that's because they're training them where to find what when.

Treats are dispensed as opportunity arises, since I give them in a targeted way to different subsets for different reasons. Sometimes it's hard to find the right group on its own. I - and they - have learned to be quite sneaky when necessary

They all seemed to like the new birdseed and grain mix. The roasted buckwheat got left to Dig and Mow. The chopped brazil nut (just one) got eaten early. They like the better quality wheat. It even looks better quality. I didn't quite see what happened to the red millet or the pin head oats. I couldn't really tracke the rest of the ingredients.

Judging the quality of a foodstuff is indeed easy on sight, but is something you can't do with ingredients that have been pulverized into a homogenized mass. Guess where the stuff that can't be sold whole (because it would be rejected) goes.

I too find it really difficult to see what they're selecting first if it's small, but what's not so popular is obvious even if it is small because it gets left till last, so we get there by a process of elimination.

But the slow adoption of the new mix here surprised me. I was on the verge of giving it up as a flat shot, and just sourced some decent quality wheat, when I realized that now I was rinsing it, they were eating all of it. So I am now giving about 60% wheat and 40% the new assorted pigeon mix. Plus top dressing with sardines or whatever as per normal.

 

[becstalls]

coming back to the use of sulphur / sulfur, Nicol says the following about its use during a discussion of the benefits of dustbathing:

p.91 “hens that used an available dustbath reduced their mite and lice infestations by 80-100% within a week in comparison with non-users, with sulphur a particularly effective substrate in this regard… strong preference for sand over rice hulls, wood shavings or paper [for dustbath substrate]… long bouts of dustbathing that incorporate all of these possible elements [viz., scratching and raking through substrate, lie down, turn on side, raise feathers, wing shaking, head rubbing, more raking and scratching, lying, rubbing, before standing and shaking out] are a good indicator of positive welfare.”

Nothing is said there about respiratory harm caused by the sulphur in the dustbath - which doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but since her interest is hen welfare, I think she'd have mentioned it if she thought it was a significant hazard.

Petrie, could you link the article or book by Nichol that you are referencing? I’ve tried scrolling back to find it, but I’m missing it.

I’m on my 3rd permethrin treatment trying to get rid of mites/lice, and just this morning I see more crawling all over the decoy eggs again, so I guess another round of eggs have hatched. My ladies dust bathe in various places around the run, but our soil is mostly clay, so I’m wondering if it isn’t creating enough dust to be effective. Looking into mixing it with some sand.

 

[Perris]

could you link the article or book by Nichol that you are referencing? I’ve tried scrolling back to find it, but I’m missing it.

herewith the ISBN, which any library (or bookseller worth their salt) should be able to track down for you.

ISBN	1780642490, 9781780642499