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Bullfighting: When you remove the pageantry, costumes, and choreography, it is animal slaughter for amusement. We can’t expect good lives for chickens until all domestic animals are treated with the same humane respect.
The Hipster Hens, the Graham Quackers and I have been throwing confetti around the coop! We’re celebrating the sixth anniversary of Randy’s Chicken Blog!
You’ve been keeping chickens for awhile and now you think you’d like to try some ducks. Cool! That’s what I did! But you need to know from the get-go that ducks are not chickens. Here are some of the differences I discovered in my first few months of keeping ducks.
It looked like Rafael was trying to grow his own little unicorn horn. But he’d gotten confused and had grown it on entirely the wrong part of his body. It was actually a feather follicle cyst. Who knew?? Feather follicle cysts are a rare phenomenon in chickens.
Here are some gift ideas for your favorite chickens, ducks, and people - for the holidays, or anytime!
“Is it ok to store eggs at room temperature?” It’s a question that doesn’t come with a yes/no answer.
Nowadays in the US there are regulations that mandate that anybody selling eggs must refrigerate them. Why? Because of Salmonella, a bacterium that sickens and kills a lot of folks every year, and sometimes lives in eggs. Here’s the catch, though. The United Kingdom and much of Europe have regulations that mandate that anybody selling eggs should not refrigerate them. And the Salmonella rates in the UK are actually lower than in the US. Confused yet? Read this post!
If you gauge success by sheer numbers, chickens are unmatched. They were nonexistent 8000 years ago, at the dawn of agriculture. Then they were domesticated from wild jungle fowl and today there are something like 26 billion of them. They’re more abundant than any other bird and there are four chickens for every human. If you were a jungle fowl living 8000 years ago, do you think you would choose the path to “success,” or would you decide to stay in the jungle?
A beautifully written novel about nurturing and love and sadness and loss…and chickens.
One of my hens is eating eggs! I installed a coop cam to surveil the nest boxes and maybe I’ve actually caught the guilty bird! But is everything what it appears to be?
A coop cam: A perfect solution for surveilling the coop for a nefarious egg eating hen! And also perfect for a bazillion other uses that I thought of as I installed it. Here’s the scoop on how I set it up.
The Hipster Hens and I just gathered around to blow the candles out on another birthday cake! Randy’s Chicken Blog just celebrated its 5th birthday! Getting from the 4th birthday to the 5th required traversing the pandemic. What a crazy year!
Somebody’s eating eggs before I can collect them out of the nest boxes. Before I can take any action, I need to find the perpetrator, and that’s not easy! Interrogations would probably not prove to be fruitful. Sitting in the coop 24/7 could waste a whole lot of time. But maybe a coop cam would be the perfect solution!
I’m surprised at the sheer number of articles out there on the internet that earnestly claim floating a few ping-pong balls on a water container will prevent them it freezing in cold weather. The idea seems to fly in the face of logic and science. Interestingly, of the 15 articles I found that tout ping-pong balls, only three indicate that the writer had actually tried them. And none of those three actually said that they’d prevented or slowed ice formation in their chicken water. And I found no mention of a controlled experiment. On the other hand, I’m being pretty earnest about ping-pong balls not working. Where’s my controlled experiment? Oh. Well. It’s right here.
I get a steady trickle of messages from readers, and that’s great! I love hearing from you! This was a banner week - with a superb question about car-eating chickens and a torrent of messages about the dinosaur/chicken connection from Oklahoma middle-schoolers.
As long as there have been domestic animals in cold climates, there has been the problem of keeping the animals’ water from freezing. Here is a list of suggestions for keeping your chickens’ water liquid this winter. I also debunk some widespread “solutions” that just don’t work.
I don’t know how you spent 2020, but more than likely it was pretty much like the way I spent it—lots of time at home. I’m fortunate to have my chickens to occupy my time. There’s absolutely no hardship in spending lots of time with the Hipster Hens. I also have no problem with the time I spend reading books. Of course, books with chicken themes or at least a chicken connection keep finding their way into my hands. Here are my favorite chicken reads from the past year.
