Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[rural mouse]

Babies today
Hear a lost poult, found it 30ft from mom who had 3 with her. Took 2 and left her one. 2 hrs later I heard the one 50 ft away from mom. She was paying no attention to it. Busy eating grass seed.
She couldn't even take care of one
She had them out in poultry yard. Which was why I took them and gave them to another sitting on eggs in a coop.
Of course I didn't think to take a picture.

Later I heard chicks in the box with the old buff hen. I had given her 8 and a few were added. 4 added an one marked didn't hatch. She has 2 black and 6 white. I gave the 2 black to another hen who had started sitting at the same time in the same coop. She was run off her nest and just started another . She is happy.

Buff butt with some of the chicks.
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I moved her to a crate in the coop so she has some room. Why they picked the rollaway nest boxes is beyond me. I guess it's a tight space and they feel secure.

I somehow ended up with 3 broodies sharing 20 chicks. Cardhu and PITA sleep together with chicks. But PITA and Focus range together with chcks drifting between them.

 

[fuzzi]

Naomi is taking excellent care of her first brood of (Tractor Supply) chicks.

Two males, two females, not sure on #5 and #6.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

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Naomi is taking excellent care of her first brood of (Tractor Supply) chicks.

Two males, two females, not sure on #5 and #6.

She’s living up to her name!

 

[fuzzi]

She’s living up to her name!

I guess I'll name one of the pullets Ruth.

 

[Shadrach]

10/07.

 

[Perris]

Xmoor's broody hormones have subsided, I think, bringing the first 'leave broodies on fake eggs' experiment to a close. She seemed to have been drifting back to normality the last few days (she was not in a trance whenever I looked in on her), and this morning I found her off for breakfast at 5.30, and still off 3 hours later:

So she sat for 5 1/2 weeks, on 2 fake eggs. I did not remove the eggs or block the nest because she could/would simply have moved operations to another of the 8 nest boxes (they all get used by various hens) or worse, gone off and nested out, where I may or may not have found her before a predator did.

For the first couple of weeks she vacated the nest whenever a more senior hen wanted it, and I thought she was being bullied off and so might not make a very good broody when she does get the chance, but now I think she was just happy to take donations. I once moved the eggs out of the nest and onto the coop floor in front to see what she would do, and she somehow (I did not witness it) picked up one of them (the one that looked most like the egg she lays, fwiw) and put in back in the nest.

Apart from swearing at me and pecking me every time I removed the lid on the nest box to lift her out for daily ablutions, I can't fault her behaviour, and I think she's shown good potential as a broody. She will be 1 in a month, and she'll get first dibs at playing broody in 2026, assuming she's still with us then.

Rhondda and Aberglasny are still sitting in neighbouring nest-boxes in another coop, so those experiments are still running.

 

[Labsandchickens8]

at the risk of appearing to be a kill joy, I have to draw attention to some wrinkles in this image. The vegan-friendly article you linked to says "On a cellular level, lab-grown meat is exactly the same as meat that has been taken from an animal. As such, the actual taste of the meat should be the same as conventional meat, or certainly very, very close. But the notion of flavour is slightly more complex and includes both olfaction (the sense of smell) and also trigeminal nerve stimulation which takes the texture and mouthfeel of food into account. As such, there is a potential difference between real meat and cultured meat because of possible textural differences."

Well if that was true, all the premium meat advertising guff that trades on what the livestock ate (e.g. pasture fed beef, salt marsh lamb, forest chicken) must be false. Moreover, surely we all know that animals (including us) are what we eat. And that variation in diet impacts the final product; we know this from experience, eating e.g. Cretan wild thyme honey.

Given my attitude to chicken feed, I'm sure you'll understand my reluctance to eat manufactured meat and via it whatever unidentified colourless liquids must constitute its inputs.

I completely agree with this. We've been told over and over again that something is healthy or at least safe and it turns out to have serious unforeseen consequences, if not totally foreseeable ones. For example - there are ads from the 1950s urging parents to put Coca Cola in their babies' bottles for good health and popularity. How many kids grew up with rotten teeth then, if not diabetes?

 

[kattabelly]

One of my barred rock chicks takes cover from airborne threats by just hiding her head, like a human kid putting their hands over their eyes and thinking no one can see them. Today a large gull went screeching overhead while I was sat in a low squat fiddling with something and I found myself channeling Henry, with a chicken hiding her head under my bum.

(I hope it's ok to say that and it gives you a smile more than it makes you sad.)

 

[Skyeknight]

Is there any danger if one of my chickens took a few bites out of a raw potato?

This morning I went to feed the sheep a bucket of small potatoes, ones too small for human consumption. But the sheep were all at the back of the field, so I put the bucket on a "table" inside the coop of my CX pullets. It was convenient that way since their coop is near the sheep and I needed to feed the CX anyways. When I went to feed the CX and sheep in the late afternoon I noticed a few potatoes were scattered on the table with beak marks, like a bird had held it really tight or something. Besides these "bite" marks only 2 small chucks were missing from the potatoes. The potatoes have already started getting long white sprouts, so I need to feed them all quickly before they turn green and toxic. Don''t know if any of those sprouts were eaten.

Now there are 2 possibilities. The first one is a corvid or other bird species went through a bigger gap in my chicken wire covering the backside of the the coop. The second which I find a little bit more likely is that 1 of the pullets jumped on the "table" and tried to find out if the potatoes were edible. If it was corvids I would expect to see beak marks like this in the stored potatoes in the barn. I have said before that one of the pullets tried to jump the fence and I know they tend to grab my skin and are not as gentle. So even though they are CX they seem to be rather athletic.

Honestly very impressed if it was one of the pullets!

 

[Shadrach]

11/12.
31C and sticky. Not critical heat yet but not comfortable for the chickens of me.