Whats The Strangest Things Your Chickens Have Ever Eaten???

[shepherd]

My chickens have eaten all kinds of strange things like: glass,bones,mice,aluminum,plastic,chicken meat, squirrel meat, snapping turtle meat, largemouth bass....ect.

My chickens eat anything they can fit down their throat.

Whats the strangest things your chickens have eaten?

 

[Ravishaw]

Ok this is not MY rooster, but he was offered to me. I just don't want a rooster yet. I want my hens to be laying when I introduce a young rooster and let them beat him up for a while.

There's a rooster named Chirpy who lives back by my grandpa's ranch shop. Old dead farm equipment, lots of bolts/nuts, a huge air compressor etc. There's a rooster that somehow resides on this old farm shop stuck right in the middle of a growing suburb in Phoenix, AZ.

The other day my dad witnessed the following tale.

Chirpy was just wandering about the shop when folks showed up to move an old cotton trailer. Well the wheels were flat so the men brought in a big jack and jacked the first wheel up. Out crawled a big scorpion and Chirpy zoomed across the shop, and with three pecks had eaten the scorpion. Well the folks were impressed. They went to jack up the second tire... Out show another scorpion madder than a hornet homing in on someone to sting. He never had a chance. Chirpy ate him in three quick pecks. WOW! What a story, you say. Well it's not over. The men jacked up the third wheel and out shot another, much smaller more deadly scorpion. Chirpy ate him whole. End of scorpions. There was no scorpion under the fourth tire.

Chirpy got mighty ill after that. He disappeared for the better part of two weeks and only barely stumbled back to the shop to drink some water and lay on his side a bit.

He has recovered, but his crow sounds different. Where his crow used to be a strong triumphant refrain, he sound grating, and ends his call short. I wonder if the scorpions did him an injury he hasn't recovered from yet.

 

[shepherd]

Thats an awesome story.
The obvious reason is he got stung swallowing the scorpions, how many times... who knows. But from the sounds of it, your rooster should be fine. The venom of the scorpions paralizes small insects but it shouldnt be able to take down a healthy rooster.

 

[33yardbirds]

Quote:
You have my chickens.

Ribbon, tried to eat a shoe lace, but I managed to get the other end.

 

[j71]

Unfortunatley.....


Paint chips....we power washed the deck a few motnhs back leaving some paint chips.....flakes if you will...

Sure enoguh, they ate them....We did clean up as much as we could but not possible to get every single one...

Besides that, I would say Corned Beef fat.....I threw it out for the cat but before the cat could even consider getting to it the birds were all over it.

 

[hencackle]

A shrew, a screw, baby rats, and a toad. There's no telling what other oddities they have eaten which I didn't witness. If only they would eat bean beetles, potato beetles, Harlequin beetles, and Eastern Tent caterpillars.

 

[azelgin]

A Styrofoam ice chest.

 

[TinyLittleFarm]

Sidewalk chalk that my kids left out. They had pink poop the next morning.

 

[CMV]

Quote:

When processing birds I have found some amazing things inside them. One bird had a piece of grass that stretched from his crop all the way through to the other end. I couldn't believe it. I thought it was fishing line at first. I've also found screws, nails, bolts and nuts.

 

[swordgeek]

Rubbery ear bud from an iPod. It came back out eventually. I replaced it, don't worry!

They frequently pick off toads large and small, leopard frogs, and salamanders, the poor things. I chased one hen around after she found the back half of a freshly-dead mouse, which something obviously got half of first. She ran away from me with the torso stuffed in her mouth and the back legs and tail hanging out. Jumped up on a perch and swallowed the rest in two bites before I could get to her.