Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Shadrach]

Here’s another understory chicken.
View attachment 4091829

She's not too bad of an example of a proper Crested Cream Legbar. Her chest looks a bit pale with not enough orange in it, but the head looks good.

 

[RoyalChick]

I asked because your yard is lovely and is the best demonstration I've seen of what can be done with limited space and chickens. You know a lot about what you grow and you've put a huge amount of work into it. Frankly I'm jealous.

I agree. It is gorgeous.
My issue is I don’t have enough low-growing evergreens so for 6 months of the year it is too exposed.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

Went out to the run to feed the girls their evening meal (drizzling on and off all day, and very damp), and the whole yard smells like sardines! These things need a warning label! Heavy rain is predicted again for this evening, so fingers crossed.

@Perris and @Shadrach, you've read a lot of academic journal articles and so forth on poultry nutrition. I've been trying to figure out how much these three (12 weeks) want to eat, and I saw ~ 240 g for the total amount. I weighed the feed, and that came out to about 1 1/4 cup (~295 cc) per day. I fermented that much for three straight days, and it's WAY too much (no treats, other than the slivered almonds the other day and stinky fish today.)

Are there recommended feed weights for FERMENTED feeds which take into account the apparent extra nutritional availability provided by fermentation? Otherwise, all I can think of is that their whole-grain feed is literally more dense than commercial pellets, so less (by weight) needs to be fed. Or both. I know there are lots of "save money by fermenting feed!", but that's not my motivation.

Anyway, any research articles you might recommend about fermented foods and amounts needed per chicken that I could read? I can generally gnaw through most of them, as long as they have a reasonable abstract, discussion, and conclusion.

- I'm just fermenting what seems to work. This isn't keeping me up at night. But I'm a bit shocked.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

I agree. It is gorgeous.
My issue is I don’t have enough low-growing evergreens so for 6 months of the year it is too exposed.

Do you have enough space for rhododendrons/ azaleas/ laurels etc? Before we got our girls, a friend of my daughter brought over two POL pullets, who had fun exploring the back yard. When they saw the cat, they alerted spectacularly and flew to a stretch of rhodies etc. and pretty much hung out there the rest of the afternoon, just messing around under the cover.

Here in the southern Appalachian Mountains/ southern Blue Ridge Mountains, we have deep, damp mountain coves entirely filled with thickets of wild mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) and native rhodies, colloquially called "laurel hells." During the Cherokee Indian removals in 1838 (the Trail of Tears) and later in the American Civil War, people trying to hide from semi-legal militias successfully hid out in them, and probably so can chickens.

I'm adding more azaleas (and kalmia etc.) from other parts of the yard to that spot and hope that our girls can go yard-ranging there. I just worry about the chicken digging vs. shallow-rooted systems of this type of plant.

 

[RoyalChick]

She's not too bad of an example of a proper Crested Cream Legbar. Her chest looks a bit pale with not enough orange in it, but the head looks good.

Well she thinks she is the bees knees so I probably won’t share your comments with her!
That picture was late summer before her molt. She is darker now but also less pink. Don’t have a great picture but you can kind of see here that her chest got darker.
I honestly couldn’t care. She seems like a healthy happy little chicken with a good eye for wriggly things in the soil. She survived a hawk attack and I am just happy to have her still with me.

 

[MrsNorthie]

It was a little over-cast today so little Miss Doodlebug decided that the shade cloth made a better hammock.. While Spud stood on one of the outdoor roosts admonishing her.

The wind got a little robust, dislodging it from the posts on one side. This shade cloth normally covers their out door roosting/feeder pavillion, which is going to become the giant dust bath when we finish the new 300 sqft coop space in the barn / shed. The feeders will be under the steel roof overhang on the concrete pad that will be framed in and filled with something more pleasant to stand on. (and despite doing more ground feeding, some of the girls get a little unhappy when their feeders are empty. ;-) )

We were out there all day yesterday, as we are in the process of remodeling again... It was 84 F / 28.8 C, full sun.. today, overcast and more pleasant. (I didn't sunburn as bad as I used to. LOL)

Once this phase of the project is done, I will be turning my attention to chicken friendly landscaping. I am envious of the beautiful space @Perris has. It looks like the perfect chicken oasis!

 

[Shadrach]

Why is it that the time people choose to act up is the same time when one has least pateince for it!

Two hours today. No ranging pictures; human stuff got in the way and then I had to clean Henry up. He's got maggot worms. That's technically fly strike and it's happened in the last three days, or at least the worms have. There is no wound that I can see but his feathers are disgusting, caked in wet shite. Hopefully I got most of them. It's difficult on your own. Hopefully it's just the shite the maggots are in and there isn't a wound.
He looked very sick today. He's gone to roost with a damp arse. I had him on my lap for a good half an hour cleaning his arse and getting some rooster booster into him with a syringe. There's blood in his droppings now.
Not at all sure where we go from here in a positive direction.
Sylph flew up on to my lap a couple of times while I was tending to Henry.
I was at the field until 21.30 with a head torch on trying to get things done.

Mow is in a nestbox.

 

[RoyalChick]

Why is it that the time people choose to act up is the same time when one has least pateince for it!

Two hours today. No ranging pictures; human stuff got in the way and then I had to clean Henry up. He's got maggot worms. That's technically fly strike and it's happened in the last three days, or at least the worms have. There is no wound that I can see but his feathers are disgusting, caked in wet shite. Hopefully I got most of them. It's difficult on your own. Hopefully it's just the shite the maggots are in and there isn't a wound.
He looked very sick today. He's gone to roost with a damp arse. I had him on my lap for a good half an hour cleaning his arse and getting some rooster booster into him with a syringe. There's blood in his droppings now.
Not at all sure where we go from here in a positive direction.
Sylph flew up on to my lap a couple of times while I was tending to Henry.
I was at the field until 21.30 with a head torch on trying to get things done.

Mow is in a nestbox.
View attachment 4091877

Oh so sorry. Poor Henry. Sounds miserable.

 

[Shadrach]

Went out to the run to feed the girls their evening meal (drizzling on and off all day, and very damp), and the whole yard smells like sardines! These things need a warning label! Heavy rain is predicted again for this evening, so fingers crossed.

@Perris and @Shadrach, you've read a lot of academic journal articles and so forth on poultry nutrition. I've been trying to figure out how much these three (12 weeks) want to eat, and I saw ~ 240 g for the total amount. I weighed the feed, and that came out to about 1 1/4 cup (~295 cc) per day. I fermented that much for three straight days, and it's WAY too much (no treats, other than the slivered almonds the other day and stinky fish today.)

Are there recommended feed weights for FERMENTED feeds which take into account the apparent extra nutritional availability provided by fermentation? Otherwise, all I can think of is that their whole-grain feed is literally more dense than commercial pellets, so less (by weight) needs to be fed. Or both. I know there are lots of "save money by fermenting feed!", but that's not my motivation.

Anyway, any research articles you might recommend about fermented foods and amounts needed per chicken that I could read? I can generally gnaw through most of them, as long as they have a reasonable abstract, discussion, and conclusion.

- I'm just fermenting what seems to work. This isn't keeping me up at night. But I'm a bit shocked.

There are lots of articles on fermented feed on the internet but not much in the way of proper studies of chicken feed. Not really surprising because there are so many different feed mixes in use by those who make their own feed that it's almost impossible to get a meaningfull result.

What you may not be taking into account is feed nutrition for a given weight. Once fermented the feed takes on water and that's volume and the chicken eats relative to it's crop state, so they say. If say 30% of the feed is water a couple of studies say the chicken stops eating. There are complications but the point is if the volume of the feed is increased by the addition of water then in effect the chicken eats less of the feed because the water has filled a portion of their crop, if that makes sense.
What you may have done is compared their consumption of dry feed to the fermented feed (?) That's the important metric.
Anyway, I wrote an article that may explain better.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/ar...fluence-it-may-have-on-feeding-regimes.79124/

In most cases it doesn't bear much relevance to the majority of chicken keepers but I found the topic interesting. The links at the end are worth reading. The one thing that I found of particular interest is that chickens can choose to send food to their crop or straight to their proventriculous and on to their gizzard so crop contents will not give a true picture of what and how much a chicken has eaten.

 

[fuzzi]

Why is it that the time people choose to act up is the same time when one has least pateince for it!

Two hours today. No ranging pictures; human stuff got in the way and then I had to clean Henry up. He's got maggot worms. That's technically fly strike and it's happened in the last three days, or at least the worms have. There is no wound that I can see but his feathers are disgusting, caked in wet shite. Hopefully I got most of them. It's difficult on your own. Hopefully it's just the shite the maggots are in and there isn't a wound.
He looked very sick today. He's gone to roost with a damp arse. I had him on my lap for a good half an hour cleaning his arse and getting some rooster booster into him with a syringe. There's blood in his droppings now.
Not at all sure where we go from here in a positive direction.
Sylph flew up on to my lap a couple of times while I was tending to Henry.
I was at the field until 21.30 with a head torch on trying to get things done.

Mow is in a nestbox.
View attachment 4091877