Can I say chickens?

M

Mary Stetler

Well-known member
Wellllll, my chickens officially turned to pets this year as they stopped giving me eggs. My overhead door has been broken after a heifer ran through it and I left it at half mast for years. Welllll something was menacing the girls so they started laying outside. I never could figure out where. Sitting and watching for hours didn't help. I have trapped a few critters and things have calmed down. I finally replaced the door this week since it was warm (relatively), not well but, it goes up and down. I intend to force the girls to stay inside until I see some production this spring. They can't keep their legs crossed forever.
 
Ours stopped laying a few weeks ago, and I gave them a rest. I turned on the lights a couple weeks ago and iI began getting one or two a day for a few days. The windstorm hit, and they stopped completely again and haven't re-started. I will give them a few more days and then I will turn off the lights again since there is no use wasting the electricity. I had a group of Polish hens a few years ago that were prolific layers, but would always escape confinement and lay outside. The dog and the grandchildren could sometimes find the nests, but we never knew how old the eggs were. Predators of various kinds eventually got them all, and I replaced them with more hens who were amenable to confinement and made things tighter also. We still lose an occasional chicken, but none have been lost lately.
 
I watched an interesting video about bird intelligence and communication skills, and possible language. The video is focused on crows, but it could also be true of other birds,
For whatever reason, they decided to use AI on a computer to analyze the cawing of crows, and discovered that they make different sounds for different things, or people.

They make different alert sounds for someone they think might be a danger, than for someone who puts out food for them, but is was more than just that.
They also made different sounds for different people who were there but not a threat, and other crows who were in a different place and saw the same person, also make the same “word” for that person.

Even though the cawing sounds the same to a human ear, the computer was able to differentiate between the sounds enough to suggest that crows actually have a language, similar to humans.
Here is the link for the video I was watching, and it explains all of this in depth, and with examples. The video title makes it sound dramatic, but the video is actually pretty sensible and not just fake drama.

 
Mary Stetler said:
Wellllll, my chickens officially turned to pets this year as they stopped giving me eggs. My overhead door has been broken after a heifer ran through it and I left it at half mast for years. Welllll something was menacing the girls so they started laying outside. I never could figure out where. Sitting and watching for hours didn't help. I have trapped a few critters and things have calmed down. I finally replaced the door this week since it was warm (relatively), not well but, it goes up and down. I intend to force the girls to stay inside until I see some production this spring. They can't keep their legs crossed forever.
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Hi, this is my first post here. I have free range chickens, mostly hens, two hens are over 12 years old and sometimes they lay an egg. Last year I got brown leghorn hens from a hatchery in Iowa and they are productive egg layers.
 
Earl S. Much said:
Hi, this is my first post here. I have free range chickens, mostly hens, two hens are over 12 years old and sometimes they lay an egg. Last year I got brown leghorn hens from a hatchery in Iowa and they are productive egg layers.
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Glad you have decided to post here, Earl S. Much!! Welcome!
Our tractor supply store has been selling chicks for years. I have bought a few there. this last year our Fleet Farm decided to compete. It is closer and I picked up 4 silver laced wyandotte chicks. They are my favorite breed. I also go to the twice a year chicken swap to find chickens I don't really need and to a farmer up in Chilton who sells months old chicks.
Over the years, my flock has been wiped out twice and I swear I will never get chickens again. And then I hear peeping somewhere.... :rolleyes:
 
I don't have chickens but live in a rural area where I can always find fresh eggs for sale. A friend owns the local greenhouse and always has chickens (and ducks and sometimes button quail) wandering around. The prettiest ones were Icelandic chickens. His were black and silver.
 
I have around 30 chickens now, sometimes the flock grows to 60 but they disappear sometimes, I think some find a new place to roost in the community and I get raccoons and coyotes visiting but the smarter hens stay closer to the coop. I use an incubator to hatch some but I end up with too many roosters and they start getting inbred so I just been ordering 18 females from a hatchery every couple of years in recent years. I get a dozen eggs per day in the good season. Selling the eggs offsets the cost of feed and the chickens do a good job fertilizing the yard and eating bugs and weeds so I don't have to pay for pest control. I am glad other people here can relate to chicken tending :-) thanks for making me feel welcome
 
Since COVID, the quality of lots of stuff has declined. The protein content of chicken feed supposedly was reduced (below 4%?), which affects the quality of the eggs (mainly how fragile the yolks are.) I don't know a lot about chickens, but some things have driven me to do some reading on BackyardChickens.com. I was making a lot of pasta during the pandemic, and always weighed the ingredients. I weighed egg yolks and whites, and through that I discovered that all yolks weight about the same, regardless of the size of the egg. I find that to be fascinating.

If you're near central Virginia, @Earl S. Much drop me a private message. I'm always looking for another source for fresh eggs.
 
Oh darn, I am in the Mojave desert in southern California @John Brunner 4% protein would be pretty crummy feed, good scratch feed is 8% protein, egg layer feed is 16% and depending on the season and if I want the birds to be fat or have good feathers for winter some feed has different percentages, not cheap, but the birds are much healthier with better feed and can produce better eggs and live longer. I don't eat my chickens or their eggs, I just raise chickens because they give me something to do and I get to meet people, I trade eggs for homegrown vegetables and fruit or tamales, whatever, and for money.
 
Beth Gallagher said:
Pssssssst... "Kroger." 😁
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I want ones that come like this:

1ODoFkM.jpeg


That isn't a vestige from the cashier's night job.
 
We have 9 hens and 1 BIG rooster. We once had many more, along with turkeys, and, for a while, ducks and geese. There are only two of us now, so we don't need the eggs, although we aren't getting many now as it is cold. We have lights on but it doesn't seem to matter much when it is cold (-32 F.at the moment). We used to can our chickens when they stopped laying, but we haven't done that for a few years. The current rooster isn't mean, but he does harass the hens during warmer weather.
 
We don't have electricity in our Wisconsin barn but a lot of areas where the chickens choose to congregate out of the wind. In the winter I have been supplementing feed with leftovers. Hamburger is a favorite and we got a LOT from our last butcher. Hubby is grumpy we don't get eggs lately with all the attention I give the animals. (I have sheep also) but I have them because I like them, not to eat.
 
One of the things that people do with comfrey is give it to chickens to eat. Comfrey is low fiber (which is a good thing for chickens) and it is high in protein and also has a lot of other important nutrients in it. Comfrey is easy to raise and you can either plant it just outside of the chicken pen and let the chickens eat what grows inside. Or you can grow it elsewhere and feed the chickens.
There are some good comfrey/chicken videos on YouTube.

 
Mine is dead for the winter right now, too, @Mary Stetler ; but it will be coming back up in the spring. You let your chickens free range, so they probably get lots of bugs and greens and whatever else they need for good nutrition, and the comfrey would not be as attractive to them.
People that keep the chickens in a pen and just give them the low-quality chicken food would more likely have the chickens gobble up comfrey, or any other scraps that they happened to get.
 
Yvonne Smith said:
I watched an interesting video about bird intelligence and communication skills, and possible language. The video is focused on crows, but it could also be true of other birds,
For whatever reason, they decided to use AI on a computer to analyze the cawing of crows, and discovered that they make different sounds for different things, or people.

They make different alert sounds for someone they think might be a danger, than for someone who puts out food for them, but is was more than just that.
They also made different sounds for different people who were there but not a threat, and other crows who were in a different place and saw the same person, also make the same “word” for that person.

Even though the cawing sounds the same to a human ear, the computer was able to differentiate between the sounds enough to suggest that crows actually have a language, similar to humans.
Here is the link for the video I was watching, and it explains all of this in depth, and with examples. The video title makes it sound dramatic, but the video is actually pretty sensible and not just fake drama.

Click to expand...

I was clucking for the crows a little while ago, they came up for their treat ,which we slowed down on.I gave them a treat.
Our crows protect out hens from hawks.
 
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