More Adventures With My Chickens.....

Chickens are a joy and a pain in the butt. A joy because I love their personalitys but a pain as they love to poo all over the place and come inside and attack the fruitbowl.
When my daughter was 2 she was attack by our wonky legged roOster he nearly took out her eye, she has a scar on her eyebrow but no scar on her chest although he got her there to the rooster promptly had his head chopped off but was to scrawny to eat.

Sometimes when our chickens are laying where we can't find the eggs we leave them in the coup a bit longer than usual and then let them out and watch where they run to.
When our chickens lay an egg they like to make a big song and dance that they have layer an egg and it really sounds like they are saying "big egg , big egg, big egg."

One day in winter when they had stopped laying I burnt a banana cake and fed it to the chickens next day we had eggs.

One last experience sorry to blab on, but one day I opened the coup to see if there was any eggs at just the right time a saw a chicken just laying an egg, I saw it plop out of its rear end and into the nest, I felt privileged to have been at the birth of an egg.

Anyways happy eggs are good eggs.

I miss my chickens, Roy, Dale, Sally, Hillary and Laura. Coyotes got em.

a reply to: olaru12

Dam that's sad. Sorry to hear about that. Maybe you could get some roadrunner chick's for your next egg layers.

originally posted by: Cloudbuster
Chickens are a joy and a pain in the butt. A joy because I love their personalitys but a pain as they love to poo all over the place and come inside and attack the fruitbowl.
When my daughter was 2 she was attack by our wonky legged roOster he nearly took out her eye, she has a scar on her eyebrow but no scar on her chest although he got her there to the rooster promptly had his head chopped off but was to scrawny to eat.

Sometimes when our chickens are laying where we can't find the eggs we leave them in the coup a bit longer than usual and then let them out and watch where they run to.
When our chickens lay an egg they like to make a big song and dance that they have layer an egg and it really sounds like they are saying "big egg , big egg, big egg."

One day in winter when they had stopped laying I burnt a banana cake and fed it to the chickens next day we had eggs.

One last experience sorry to blab on, but one day I opened the coup to see if there was any eggs at just the right time a saw a chicken just laying an egg, I saw it plop out of its rear end and into the nest, I felt privileged to have been at the birth of an egg.

Anyways happy eggs are good eggs.

We have 23 hens and 2 roosters. They all have names, and they have their little personality quirks. We know which of our birds are laying just by looking at the eggs. Our birds get only grain feeds... no pellets. We supplement their winter feed with red pepper flakes and sunflower seed. We get very little fall off in egg production.

We also have 13 ducks, and ducks are... well... ducks. They lay almost daily from spring through fall, but, they take the winters off.

Where we live (N. Idaho) coyotes, wolves, bears and big cats are a constant threat; ducks are the best alarms EVER. Ducks will let you know if anything threatening is in close. My favorite duck is a young female mallard that I call "Doc". NOTHING gets close to our property without "Doc" letting me know, and, for a small mallard, she is the LOUDEST duck you have ever heard.

I plan on licensing them to the military. L.R.A.D.

Long Range Attack Duck

a reply to: eriktheawful

It sounds like your chickens are playing egg hunt with you

It's a bit mean to hide them in brambles, though. However, help is at hand...

Easter is coming up and who doesn't like to go on an Easter Egg hunt?

Just invite the neighbour's kids round and let them loose.

'Remember kids, chickens are sneaky little varmints. Look very carefully, you might wanna start near the brambles...'

a reply to: eriktheawful

In many ways they are also pets. I sit outside and they come up to me like any dog or cat would.

Funny little critters arent they . My wife thought is would be a good idea to buy the kids some baby chickens after visiting a pet store , Well we got brown chook ( Aussie for chicken ) and white chook , no need to explain the names i would hope . Anyways the lad tripped while carrying brown chook and must have damaged a leg pretty bad , poor thing could not run away from the dog ( cocker spaniel ) when he decided it was time to practice his retrieval skills , when she tried to go fast she could only run in a circle . Many was the time the dog would have the poor thing in its mouth sitting at the back doorstep with that look at what i found look , luckily for her he got bored with that after a while . And egg hiding jeez , we searched high and low for that dead mouse we thought had died in the kitchen but came up empty handed even though we were sure the smell was coming from the general direction of the fridge . Anyway a a year or so later i was running coaxe under the house for the kids tv and guess what i found , about 50 eggs directly under the fridge . Mystery solved . Good layers both of them but somehow it didnt seem right to eat their eggs , dont ask me why , perhaps it was a pet thing .As for feeding them , they got scraps supplemented with wheat . Oh and brown chook lasted years longer than white chook .
Interesting fact , i think . Dark chooks lay dark eggs and white chooks lay white eggs .

a reply to: eriktheawful

I had some this past summer that sat out in the summer heat for weeks........cracking them open? PUSS.......very, stinky, nasty PUSS.....bllllaaaaaahhhhhh!

Sounds nasty lol, we have some horribly sweltering summers here. I keep my chickens in a little mobile a-frame coop so finding the eggs is never a problem before the heat ruins them.

Most times I have them locked up in the chicken run where the hen house is. Protects them from preds, mostly here are stray dogs.

But it's obvious to me that they are much happier when I let them out to free range. The main problem I'm having when I do that is the egg hiding as you've all seen and:

They seem to dig up all of my son's Legos that ended up buried in the front yard!