The Natural Chicken Keeping thread - OTs welcome!

[TeaChick]

Plant a pecan tree.

I have about a dozen pecan trees in my yard and we don't see crows.
I think they don't like the dogs.

 

[Pozees]

Just got in from working with him and a stick for a few minutes. Danged boy was seriously thinking about charging the stick! WIll try to get in as much stick training as possible before the snow comes in a few days. Better to do it with open areas than when he is closed in with snow.

My personal opinion on a cockerel that charges a human: Be prepared to cull him. Some learn fast and the rest are dangerous, or at the very least, irritating, if they aren't big enough to cause actual harm. Kassaundra's experience is illustrative. Also consider that the gene pool will carry that potential if you hatch anything he may have fertilized. No one but you can decide what you will tolerate in your flock, and if it was me I'd give him a few tries with schooling, but after that, if he kept charging, he would be in a stew pot.

 

[fosterson]

We've done the same thing trying to boil them. lol

Mom got a renovated kitchen one year for Christmas doing that.

My dad was the fire chief at the time.

 

[TeaChick]

I guess you don't worry about them eating raw whites and then wanting to eat their own eggs? I thought I had read somewhere that that might be a problem, which was why I was diligently washing out every last speck of whites.


Haha, yeah! You know the expression "necessity is the mother of invention", right? Well, I think laziness must be the father!

Oh, I could so do that. I don't like to turn on my electric oven if I don't have to, but I could easily put them in my bake oven attached to my masonry heater. I light a fire in there once or twice a day, so the bake oven gets warm whether I'm cooking something or not. I could easily slip in the eggs shells for a bit. Thanks!!

Do you rinse out the whites first? When I tried microwaving the egg shells so I wouldn't have to clean out the whites, it seemed to make a bigger mess because the whites got hard and stuck everything together. Then I had an even harder time breaking them up! Maybe it wouldn't be that way in the bake oven.

Could someone post a picture so I can see what size you're crushing them to? I've never given them oyster shell, so I don't know what that looks like. Should I be giving them both?

Another thing I do with the egg shells is to boil them in water in the microwave, then sometimes I dry them and sometimes I don't, then I stick them in the blender.
My chickens tend to leave the egg shells if the pieces are held together with membrane or if the small pieces fall through the feed and end up in the bottom of the feeder. (well, feeder should be in quotation marks, I use a smart balance container nailed to the inside of the hen house.)

 

[TeaChick]

Who was it that was asking if it was normal for the hens to sunbathe? Mine fight for a sunny spot!

After I took this I looked up to see 4 more bathing beauties just up from these girls in the coop!

LOL
Mine seem to hide from the sun in the woods.
But sometimes I'll fine several of them laying in this position in front of the shed; some of them are preening and one is usually dust bathing.
I like the pic!!!

 

[TeaChick]

I just got flogged!!!!

Booster wasn't backing away, and so I advanced and the little &$(@# flogged my ankle. I'm yelling and Buster comes to the rescue, jumps on Booster and chases him away.
Next step is to get a stick and start working with that guy. Hes a good roo but not putting up with that. He's about 6 months old.

I got flogged like that when I was a teenager. I didn't want a roo b/c of that incident.
Found out later that not all roosters are aggressive like that (that was a white Leghorn).

 

[TeaChick]

Okay so I need to know if I'm being paranoid or justified with my new found worry for my Silkie Pia. She didnt come out this morning I checked and she was in the nest box. Well she just came out and sat on the ground in a heap like a broody would. So maybe she's going broody..... She is a silkie afterall!! I checked the next box and there was a soft shelled egg. I picked Pia up felt her belly (soft) and she was kinda whimpering.... So I put her in the sun to warm up. She is sun bathing and looking around but hasn't gotten up. Hmmmmm. Hope I'm just being paranoid but this isn't usual for her. She doesn't get up if I walk over, she doesn't get up when other hens come by. Yeah she's limping or stumbling.

Hope she's feeling better soon!

 

[Pozees]

aaggjg - any discharge from nostrils? Do her eyes look normal? Is she eating and drinking? If I had to guess, assuming she has no discharge, I would say it is either Marek's or parasite overload. Check for external parasites (mites/lice) which most often are evident under wings, around vent, and on head.

If you decide you want to worm, there is lots of information here and elsewhere, but what I opted for was Safeguard liquid for goats, 0.5 cc per large fowl and 0.25 cc per bantam (Silkie), repeat in 7-10 days. I bought a box of 1 cc syringes without needles from Amazon when I ordered the Safeguard, but they also had the Safeguard at the local feed store.

If it is Marek's it is highly unlikely she will survive. If it is parasites she may, although once they are down it's tough. If it is something else (someone on another thread recently posted that his birds may have died from a leukosis (sp?), which I think he said was basically tumors that grow until organs don't work or until nerves or blood vessels are blocked) all you can do is support her and hope for the best. I'd say separate from the flock, but if she has something contagious it's probably too late for that anyway. I would still separate just in case.

I am very sorry, and am hoping she pulls through for you. I think you did the right thing giving her some polyvisol, and you can try giving her some scrambled or boiled egg, some scratch, anything she will eat. I will be thinking of you.

 

[TeaChick]

This notion runs pretty deep ... all the "modernization" of farming and food. I believe it started with great intentions, but the result is that producing your own food began to be seen as dirty and dangerous.

I know, I know!!! I'm having the same trouble with getting my DH into raising chickens, but he's getting it.
I've gotten into avoiding chemicals (they're in all sorts of places we don't even think about) and I'm mainly working on our food, so we're trying to eat more fresh foods and less packaged foods and make more of the "processed" foods that we like. (The kids have PBJ sandwiches for lunch, but we make our own bread; I made tortillas week before last, but haven't had time to do it again.)
The main things we try to avoid/watch out for are corn syrup (any corn ingredient is most likely GMO, but we're having to make adjustments as we go, so we're going slowly), cotton seed oil (cotton growing is regulated to non-food standards, then they sell what they can to the food industry, but it wasn't grown to food standard regulations in the first place....

) and soy (all of it has extra phyto-estrogens and almost all of it is GMO, so.....no brainer).

Anyway, yes, I feel ya on all that. Yes, I think the intentions in the modernizations, like the McCormmick reaper were good ideas (although, at the time, they put ppl out of work just like the automated answering systems do today), but genetically modifying food crops is a matter of raping the soil and greed.

I'll get down off my soapbox now.

 

[Kassaundra]

My personal opinion on a cockerel that charges a human: Be prepared to cull him. Some learn fast and the rest are dangerous, or at the very least, irritating, if they aren't big enough to cause actual harm. Kassaundra's experience is illustrative. Also consider that the gene pool will carry that potential if you hatch anything he may have fertilized. No one but you can decide what you will tolerate in your flock, and if it was me I'd give him a few tries with schooling, but after that, if he kept charging, he would be in a stew pot.

Totally agree, I would not have kept him, but he had a powerful protector, my husband. He (my husband) would never have believed he just "disappeared" or died of "natural causes", besides we don't lie to each other and certainly wouldn't start over a chicken!