- Feb 16, 2014
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Hello! I thought I'd take a moment to introduce myself (and of course our chickens). My name is Lindsay. My husband Jesse and I live in Salt Lake City, UT, and as of 2 1/2 weeks ago we are proud parents of four rescued hens. These hens reside in a Pawhut Deluxe Backyard Chicken Coop we call Cluckingham Palace.
We started out rescuing a blue-laced red wyandotte (Raspberry Pi) from a ranch where she was getting incessantly picked on. She's still fairly skittish, but is really coming around.
Since there was still plenty of day left in the day, we cruised around the classifieds online to see about others we could rescue. We went out to pick up a buff orpington, but wound up coming home with a trio:
Parmesan, the buff orpington
Sesame, the sussex (she's a little special)
And Dominique, the dominique -- not because we ran out of creativity, but because she's a sassy diva and the name just fit
Those last three are inseparable. We kept the dividers out of the nesting box section of the coop at the advice of a chicken-crazed friend who said, and I quote, "Chickens like to snuggle." As an experiment I put them back in to see how they'd react... And it was this:
We are not sure if all of them are laying, but we get 1 or 2 eggs almost every day. Which is certainly better than 0, but not the 3-4 per day we were hoping for. I'll post in other threads about that, but I'm open to any advice, suggestions, or comments regarding the seemingly low rate of laying.
I work at Tracy Aviary and am no stranger to birds, and my chicken-crazed friend is a bird trainer. In the span of 3 days we went from luring them into laps for canned corn, to this:
There's definitely potential for something there. What, exactly, I'm not sure. Maybe I'll just make trips to Petco for cat food with a chicken on my arm? Would chickens wear jesses? How about a harness? Am I just crazy? They seem so easy to train! Chicken agility course?
The ladies have the run of our large back yard (possibly their first exposure to fresh grass, from what we saw), put themselves to bed at dusk, and come out of the coop around 7:15 every morning.. They're eating high-protein layer pellets and random kitchen scraps, and probably copious quantities of bugs and such from the yard; though I'm looking at options for creating my own feed for them with organic ingredients bought in bulk (wheat, oats, flax, lentils, etc, etc, etc)... Would love thoughts on that as well.
Well, that's us. Happy to have this community here! We've been learning a lot reading people's posts!
We started out rescuing a blue-laced red wyandotte (Raspberry Pi) from a ranch where she was getting incessantly picked on. She's still fairly skittish, but is really coming around.
Since there was still plenty of day left in the day, we cruised around the classifieds online to see about others we could rescue. We went out to pick up a buff orpington, but wound up coming home with a trio:
Parmesan, the buff orpington
Sesame, the sussex (she's a little special)
And Dominique, the dominique -- not because we ran out of creativity, but because she's a sassy diva and the name just fit
Those last three are inseparable. We kept the dividers out of the nesting box section of the coop at the advice of a chicken-crazed friend who said, and I quote, "Chickens like to snuggle." As an experiment I put them back in to see how they'd react... And it was this:
We are not sure if all of them are laying, but we get 1 or 2 eggs almost every day. Which is certainly better than 0, but not the 3-4 per day we were hoping for. I'll post in other threads about that, but I'm open to any advice, suggestions, or comments regarding the seemingly low rate of laying.
I work at Tracy Aviary and am no stranger to birds, and my chicken-crazed friend is a bird trainer. In the span of 3 days we went from luring them into laps for canned corn, to this:
There's definitely potential for something there. What, exactly, I'm not sure. Maybe I'll just make trips to Petco for cat food with a chicken on my arm? Would chickens wear jesses? How about a harness? Am I just crazy? They seem so easy to train! Chicken agility course?
The ladies have the run of our large back yard (possibly their first exposure to fresh grass, from what we saw), put themselves to bed at dusk, and come out of the coop around 7:15 every morning.. They're eating high-protein layer pellets and random kitchen scraps, and probably copious quantities of bugs and such from the yard; though I'm looking at options for creating my own feed for them with organic ingredients bought in bulk (wheat, oats, flax, lentils, etc, etc, etc)... Would love thoughts on that as well.
Well, that's us. Happy to have this community here! We've been learning a lot reading people's posts!
and Welcome To BYC! 
