Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[BDutch]

No coyotes here. No profits either. Only the joy of the hens , and no casualties from whatever predator that sneaks into our or our neighbours garden.

Glad the hens give me egg-presents or give me joy with their funny behaviour and longevity. I like sharing their surplus presents with family and friends. I never counted the eggs. I guess my 8 hens gave me 4 eggs a day on average from March till August.


I do get something in return every know and then from friends and family. Empty egg cartons, real honey, a jar with self-made jam or juice.

Must say I am glad I can give them proper organic food for a very good price ( sharing 5 bags with a friend about 4 times a year, 5 bags of 20 kg is the minimum for a buy directly from a compound feed factory ).

You made me wonder what my eggs costed last year. Feed cost was only about € 200 . The PFAS test costed 100. I hardly buy bedding bc I make my own hay and often use free sand and free cardboard under the roost to keep it clean. Mealworms, supplements (mites) , bedding , DE and such may add up to € 100 in a year.

>> Approx € 400 / about 1000 eggs -> would make a price without profit of 40 ct for my bantam organic eggs.

What I found in a corner on the coop floor one day in August, after three days with very few eggs in the nestbox:

 

[Shadrach]

When does Glais arrive?
I'm living vicariously here, as I will never have a rooster.

We are all on pins and needles waiting for Glais!

23rd or 24th of this month is the current plan.

 

[Shadrach]

And in case it isn't obvious from what I've written, none of these encounters could reasonably be described as 'fighting'. Occasionally the flaring is accompanied by some jumping and kicking, but no-one wants to risk injury (I think they all witnessed it with Erddig) so one or both back down before it gets serious, and no blood has been drawn. And absolutely none of it threatens me; they run round me like a referee who's in the way during a football match

It's fighting.
The tribes used to do it all the time. It's not usually serious until one won't back off or there is a concerted attempt to displace a senior rooster. It can take years for past resentments to come out. Notch used to bully Mag until the day mag decided he had had enough and kicked Notch's arse. Every roost time from that point on, Mag would wait for Notch to arrive to roost with his hens and drive him off.

What pissed me off most is at dusk when Mag was chasing Notch was the time he as junior rooster should have been watching the hens that hadn't gone in to roost.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

23rd or 24th of this month is the current plan.

 

[BlindLemonChicken]

I am getting a rooster this weekend! I don’t think I make a good substitute either

 

[fuzzi]

The chicks have grown!

 

[Shadrach]

I have to point out for the sake of those who read this thread and have a picture of a harmonious group of mixed males and females that the reality is they all fight.
I do not know of one single keeper who observes their chickens closely who will say hand on heart their chickens always get along. They don't. Usually the scraps are face saving, over in seconds, particularly with the females. Usually there are no injuries to speak of. Sometimes all one sees are a couple of new peck marks on the males comb and wattles. It is extremely rare that such peck marks are the result over over enthusiastic grooming for example.
If one has juveniles then one has probably seen males chest bumping; that's low level fighting and one backs off and it's all over.
Like any species, chickens have to compete for mates and resources. Some fighting is inevitable. Hopefully and usually in my experience, they manage all this better than humans and don't lose the plot and try to wipe out the entire chicken world in the process of trying to show who's boss unlike some of our so called leaders.

In the better balanced tribes and groups the seniors and hopefully wiser ones keep the violence to a minimum. but it's always there. Some chickens are just plain bullies, fighting them is inevitable at some point. I've had situations when it's not been the bullies victim that has balanced the scales so to speak, it's been a senior hen or rooster who has just lost patience with all the drama.

Young cockerels getting knocked off a hen they had managed to get to crouch for them by a senior rooster goes on all the time in a large mixed sex group. That's violence/fighting. Just because a fight may have been a one punch knockout doesn't mean it wasn't violence.

 

[Shadrach]

I quit figuring out costs after the first time. It was 33 cents an egg for feed. For 6 hens and a rooster for a year. Then I thought it would be cost effective to let them hatch and eat the cockerels. Came out to $7 a lb for a 16 weeks old cockerel. This was before covid.

I've just jacked up by £500.00 my chicken costs.

 

[Shadrach]

My chickens give me joy, no amount of money can buy that.

Now, if they'd stop molting and start laying!

The field chickens are helping me to stay healthier and mobile. They provide structure to my life where before work played that role.
I had to think long and hard when Henry, Fret and Tull died about whether I wanted to continue at all.
A quick look around the sheltered over 55 years old compound I live in shows with great clarity what is likely to happen if one just drifts.

 

[Vulpes vulpes]

It's not usually serious until one won't back off or there is a concerted attempt to displace a senior rooster.

I've seen this happen before. In my experience these events, while rare, can get really violent. The senior rooster is unlikely to back down because of how much he has to lose. In the flock I had when I was a teenager, there was a point where I had way too many rooster and no way to deal with them. My favorite rooster, Penny, a magnificent crele mix who was the size of a small barge, kept the peace for many years. I was very attached to him, he was raised by a family with a young girl (who named him Penny because they thought he was a pullet) and the kid loved him very much, even though they had to give him away to us. He was gentle and kind, imagine the ideal flock protector, that was him. One day I walked outside and noticed a drop of blood on the ground, and looked up to see one of the young upstart cockerels (a silver ameraucana cross) with his feathers soaked and matted with blood. He was hanging out with the group like there was nothing wrong. It took me a while to find Penny. He was in much worse shape, cowering in a hiding spot about 100ft from the coop, equally blood soaked and blinded in one eye. One of my biggest regrets with those chickens is that I didn't bring him inside that night. I never saw him after that, he didn't return to the coop, and I believe something came and picked him off in the night. At least he had a very long and peaceful reign