Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Shadrach]

I thought the bit about unihemispheric slow wave sleep was particularly interesting. USWS is something I've talked about before because I think it's really cool, but I never considered the role it could play in resting on one leg. If one leg is controlled by the "awake" hemisphere and one is controlled by the "asleep" hemisphere, it seems intuitive to balance on one leg rather than coordinate both of them together.

An interesting sidebar on this: birds are capable of unihemispheric sleep because unlike eutherian mammals, which are the only animals with a corpus callosum, birds have no equivalent structure connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. The communication between these hemispheres is much more limited than with us. It's interesting to think about how their perspectives/consciousness might differ from ours. Is each bird really a pair of intimately connected individuals? I guess nobody is sure.

Further reading if anyone's interested:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7116194/

Not too sure about the model they've constructed but nice that academia is catching up with what some of us have known for a while now.

 

[Shadrach]

Sad day here - Muffin died last night. She actually lasted longer than I expected, I probably should have culled at the end of last week but I was ill and no-one else here can/will do it. I still really struggle with the ethics of deciding when is the right time to intervene.
That's 3 of the 5 old ladies gone since we moved here 6 months ago. Sorry will stop moping now.

On the plus side, both our lovely pullets are now laying so we're finally getting 2 eggs a day after 5 months with no eggs at all
View attachment 4306025

 

[Shadrach]

01/03.
Stayed dry. Still rather windy but we all stayed out for a couple of hours.

 

[Shadrach]

Rather a nice day. Plenty of sunshine, light winds, 12C.

I turned over a few bits of wood as we moved around the field; slaters!

 

[BDutch]

Sad day here -

 

[fuzzi]

Sad day here - Muffin died last night. She actually lasted longer than I expected, I probably should have culled at the end of last week but I was ill and no-one else here can/will do it. I still really struggle with the ethics of deciding when is the right time to intervene.
That's 3 of the 5 old ladies gone since we moved here 6 months ago. Sorry will stop moping now.

On the plus side, both our lovely pullets are now laying so we're finally getting 2 eggs a day after 5 months with no eggs at all
View attachment 4306025

I am sorry.

I feel sad when I lose mine.

 

[fuzzi]

Bigger egg on top is from Rahab, my broody extraordinaire. She and Hannah are three years old, and the last from my original purchase of day old chicks.

She has earned a retirement home here.