Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[fuzzi]

Phoebe

Dinah (right) and Julia. They are becoming very pretty OEGB pullets.

And their chick peeps are developing into "Pip-pip" sounds.

 

[MrsNorthie]

View attachment 4213314
Phoebe

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Dinah (right) and Julia. They are becoming very pretty OEGB pullets.

And their chick peeps are developing into "Pip-pip" sounds.

They are very pretty!

 

[kattabelly]

And their chick peeps are developing into "Pip-pip" sounds.

I've never kept or worked with bantams - do they ever go through a phase of sounding like they want to be (tiny) geese when they grow up? It's funny enough coming from large fowl but I can't imagine it from much smaller, more delicate birds.

 

[fuzzi]

I've never kept or worked with bantams - do they ever go through a phase of sounding like they want to be (tiny) geese when they grow up? It's funny enough coming from large fowl but I can't imagine it from much smaller, more delicate birds.

All my birds are bantams. My Dominiques make soft "honking" sounds, my Speckled Sussex "chatter", so the OEGB "Pip-pip" is new to me.

 

[no fly zone]

I've never kept or worked with bantams - do they ever go through a phase of sounding like they want to be (tiny) geese when they grow up? It's funny enough coming from large fowl but I can't imagine it from much smaller, more delicate birds.

My bantam roosters sounded like full size roosters, but my d'uccles sounded like squeak toys.

 

[Shadrach]

Something I've been thinking about lately is how we think about camouflage with our chickens. A lot of people aim for plumage that matches the color of the environment exactly. This is still a very important consideration, but maybe not how people think. It's easy to forget, but no chicken predator sees the world the way we do. Most mammals are dichromats (only see two primary colors). Birds as a whole (including chickens and hawks) are tetrachromats (see 4 primary colors). Since there's no way for us to perceive the world the way that birds do, we can hardly guess at what camouflages a chicken from hawks, if it's even possible. However, there are ways to get a very rough idea of how a mammalian predator sees its environment. It's in no way perfect, but I found an app meant to simulate colorblindness in humans that gives an approximation of dichromatic vision. I'll show some examples of how it looks:

Here's a trio of youngsters at the in-laws place, who MIL has named the Three Stooges. From the human perspective, they have okay camouflage with this backdrop, but could be better. They have nice patterns that break up their silhouettes, but their deep red color is much more saturated than the greys of their surroundings.
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However, from a dichromatic perspective, it's totally different:

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They appear to blend in beautifully. Their rusty red patterns become a benefit rather than a hindrance. This puzzled me at first, though the reason should have been obvious. A more striking example would spell it out for me:
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I had this picture of a British standard araucana on my phone, so I decided to use it. She sticks out like a sore thumb on this lawn, right?

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Again, perfectly matched! (Though obviously, she has no cover to hide in)

The reason is, of course, because dichromats find red and green indistinguishable. Because of this, saturated red plumage matches excellently with deep green plants. This might mean that red from the mahogany gene is advantageous even if it doesn't match your soil, tree bark, or anything else, so long as there's green. That's certainly my takeaway. Either way, it appears that patterning and brightness levels are much more important to a chicken's camouflage than specific color. Noisy patterns that break up a chicken's shape should do well, even if the colors don't exactly match.

My hypothesis could definitely be off here though, especially considering that any simulation of dichromat vision is likely a little bit flawed.

I also have more examples I've saved if anyone wants to see, and I can also link the app I used so you can try it yourself

P.S. this is my first time using spoilers, I hope I did it right

From what I've seen of hawks hunting, it seems to be more about movement than identification by shape, or colour and pattern.

 

[Molpet]

From what I've seen of hawks hunting, it seems to be more about movement than identification by shape, or colour and pattern.

I keep hearing white birds are targeted more and black look like crows and keep hawks away.
Most of my birds are white or black. A couple barred and a couple have red, black, buff mixed.
Hawk total 2 white, 3 black, attempt on 2 barred that I was able to stop, and Thursday one of the mixed.
Seemed to be a crime of opportunity.

 

[Shadrach]

Two and a half hours today. Heavy rain and storms this morning; mainly dry this afternoon.

Sylph walking away having drank from the bucket Mow has got her head in.
"Wow, there's some kick to that stuff in the bucket!"

 

[Perris]

One of the reasons I really wanted that SYNBREED data on individual chicken breeds was to either confirm or refute a claim I heard a while ago. Apparently the former president of the Icelandic Preservation Association said that a genetic study had found that "78% of the DNA" in the Icelandic landrace was unique, as in not found in any other chicken in the world. I knew at the very least that that phrasing was incorrect (since chickens have almost that much of their DNA in common with us) but I wanted to see the study to find out the truth. To my dismay, I have been unable to find this "2004 British study" and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it isn't even real. I was hoping it had a shred of credibility, since it's quoted by so many sources, even the livestock conservancy!

But after searching in vain for that source, I wanted to see if the Icelandic landrace was actually as genetically exceptional as everybody says. While definitely not uniquely diverse, it does appear that they have a high degree of polymorphism and above average heterozygosity for a European breed, though the Asian, African, South American, and wild clusters have them beat.

So they're still quite diverse, but to me it appears that the "78%" claims are just as fantastical as they sound

"non-commercial flocks belong to the so-called Icelandic Chicken Landrace, a genetically diverse breed that was saved from near extinction in the 1980s... Until recent years, however, the Icelandic Chicken Landrace was often believed to be a special old breed that had been isolated in Iceland since the settlement period more than 1100 years ago. At present this is not considered to be correct: recent studies suggest that the present non-commercial poultry population in Iceland is descended from different breeds imported from Europe into Iceland in recent decades and centuries, birds that then mixed with the old landrace population (Pálsdóttir & Hallsson 2016)."
https://opinvisindi.is/items/0b4deb71-b627-4427-b8c2-a5f51a8e437e

That 2016 reference is in Icelandic; maybe Google translate can help you out with it if you want to pursue it. Note that any breed 'saved from extinction' has gone through a genetic bottleneck and is usually weaker for it, not stronger.

 

[KmKmuLu shoes]