Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Perris]

How old are they/she?

Llandeilo (torn membrane) will be 2 mid September. Quincy (possibly responsible for passing little lash eggs for a couple of months now) will be 1 next month.

Lima went from active, foraging and eating normally to dead within a few days, fast decline in the last twenty four hours.

Idris went like that, not long after resuming laying after raising a brood. Quincy is her daughter from that same brood as it happens.
Q has lost a lot of weight though doesn't look sick (discovered when I lifted her out of a tree the other night). She's 2nd from the front here, taken yesterday

I've read a few recovery stories, never being quite sure that the diagnosis was correct in the first place.

I was pretty sure one of my early birds (Dorothy, RIR) had it - certainly someone laid a lash egg, and she was poorly at the time - and she recovered and even laid again. But then maybe she was ill with something else and someone else laid the lash egg. It's so hard to know what really was the problem if they recover from it; it is like trying to evaluate the efficacy of preventative measures.

It may not matter that much to the hens but I can tell you from my recent experience with Fret that it makes an enormous difference. I hated watching Fret's long and gradual decline.

I have adopted a position of supporting them as long as they want support, however hard that is to watch. For me the hardest cases are where the flock turns on the sick one because it has become a health hazard to them all. If the ill bird has something they at least think is idiopathic, it's much easier. Of course the one can arise from the other, because once they're sick with one thing, they are often more vulnerable to other, potentially contagious, things.

At present the flock are happy to associate with both Llandeilo and Quincy. Indeed, a couple of them have taken to stalking Llandeilo in the hope of a quick egg yolk snack methinx

 

[Perris]

It doesn't encase the egg in an instant as I understand it.

that is my understanding too.

 

[Perris]

It's a massive task to calculate the available nutrition for a species from a square metre of ground. For a start it changes with the weather and the seasons and new seeds and bugs arrive from lots of sources. Then of course the chickens preference changes as other options become available so while a plant may be an option for the chicken they don't take it and go for something higher on their preference list.

Absolutely. I recently found a paper that I thought was going to tell me about the nutritional value of pollen from >150 UK flowers. It turned out to be quantitative rather than qualitative. They counted the grains of pollen per flower. Huge effort.

Not sure that game was worth the candle. Fwiw it ranges from about 60 to almost 2,000,000, with a 60,000-fold range in terms of volume. It might be useful for hay-fever sufferers to know what species not to plant (I'm looking at you, common poppy).

 

[BDutch]

@Perris , a friend of mine is fermenting crumble and gives a portion of this to her chickens daily.
I told her fermenting whole wheats (grain mix) is more beneficial. But she doesn’t believe me and I didn’t have a good explanation why fermenting crumble has no/very little extra value compared to fermenting whole grains.

Do you have a reference or written explanation why fermenting whole grains is better than fermenting crumble? I couldn’t find it.

 

[Perris]

@Perris , a friend of mine is fermenting crumble and gives a portion of this to her chickens daily.
I told her fermenting whole wheats (grain mix) is more beneficial. But she doesn’t believe me and I didn’t have a good explanation why fermenting crumble has no/very little extra value compared to fermenting whole grains.

Do you have a reference or written explanation why fermenting whole grains is better than fermenting crumble? I couldn’t find it.

Actually @Altairsky has said it better than I have, here
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...ken-feed-is-it-worth-it.1664220/post-28663743

 

[Altairsky]

Actually @Altairsky has said it better than I have, here
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...ken-feed-is-it-worth-it.1664220/post-28663743

I just wanted to let everyone know that the last part about vitamin C and kefir is not correct. There is no significant variation in Vit. C content. Instead there are variations in vitamin B complex content and certain amino acids like methionine. But that refers to kefir milk specifically, nobody studied how many vitamins fermentation consume from chicken feed, and how many vitamins it adds. It was just to say that you ferment a balanced feed, and it might turn into an unbalanced treat that should not replace the entirety of the chickens diet.

 

[RoyalChick]

I just wanted to let everyone know that the last part about vitamin C and kefir is not correct. There is no significant variation in Vit. C content. Instead there are variations in vitamin B complex content and certain amino acids like methionine. But that refers to kefir milk specifically, nobody studied how many vitamins fermentation consume from chicken feed, and how many vitamins it adds. It was just to say that you ferment a balanced feed, and it might turn into an unbalanced treat that should not replace the entirety of the chickens diet.

Very interesting

 

[Perris]

I just wanted to let everyone know that the last part about vitamin C and kefir is not correct. There is no significant variation in Vit. C content. Instead there are variations in vitamin B complex content and certain amino acids like methionine. But that refers to kefir milk specifically, nobody studied how many vitamins fermentation consume from chicken feed, and how many vitamins it adds. It was just to say that you ferment a balanced feed, and it might turn into an unbalanced treat that should not replace the entirety of the chickens diet.

would you care to share your source(s) for that?

 

[Altairsky]

would you care to share your source(s) for that?

I've spend most of the day looking for that source (it had a very nice tab) but I can't find it to save my life.
I found this one which isn't exactly the same thing, and the results are not as dramatic as the one I saw (they used insignificant commercial yoghurt to ferment the thing), it also lack the vitamin analysis, but it's still better than nothing. If I'll ever find that one again, I'll post it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0023643821003923

 

[HiEverybirdy]

Did you notice how large the standard errors were in the table showing crop contents?! The text discusses the very different consumption patterns of different individuals even within a single experimental flock (and there were multiple flocks).

Which is something we've all qualitatively observed, and instinctively know to be true, despite how confounding it is for research and commercial concerns that chicken nutrition isn't one-size-fits-all.

Marans Miss Plumb is our heaviest hen but goes to roost every night with a squishy crop. She doesn't eat much, and when she does, she chooses the low-protein pellets over the higher protein crumble. Langshan Beebs is the slimmest but eats like a horse and goes to roost with a huge crop every evening.