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Ghost Leviathan posted:I've heard Hawaii is covered in feral chickens. ngl, that sounds awesome. "sorry I'm late boss, fucken pack of roos cornered me in the yard"
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Jun 4, 2020 14:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I've heard Hawaii is covered in feral chickens. The UK island Jersey is being terrorised by hordes of feral chickens, which have been waking up locals, damaging gardens and even chasing joggers. and in Norfolk Council threatens to fine people feeding ‘feral’ chickens quote:The spokesman said efforts were made to rehome the chickens last year and some were caught with nets, but as there are seven cockerels the flock keeps breeding. Heaven.
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Jun 4, 2020 16:31
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Well the roosters keep crowing and beating the poo poo out of each other. Can’t wait to not have 15 roosters anymore. Next time I’m doing CX since they rarely crow and are too fat to fight.
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Jun 12, 2020 05:23
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None of my chickens have really begun making adult noises yet. One of the cream crested legbars (which is definitely supposed to be a hen) has been acting way more aggressive with all the rest and lets out a couple loud prolonged squawks each morning when I let them into the run. How loud do hens get? It's getting close to maturity time for a few of them, with the entire flock theoretically being able to start laying in the next 2-5 weeks.
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Jun 12, 2020 14:45
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My hens (buffs, brahmas, Easter eggers, and one Wyandotte) are generally pretty quiet. The EE rooster we had crowed a lot and the Welsummers I gave to my mom talk ALL THE TIME but they aren’t very loud.
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Jun 12, 2020 15:14
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One of my hens never shuts up and the rest go from relatively quiet to cacophonous egg songs throughout the day
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Jun 12, 2020 15:20
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After some delays brough on by the old COVID we have finally got our chickens for our back garden. 3 rescue hens from a farm a bit away. They're settling in just now getting used to the lay of the land really. We have named Ada, Grace and Hedy. Ada having a rest after bullying everyone else for a bit  Grace eying me suspiciously.  Hedy eating some corn I brought to bride them  They got a bit stressed in the move and have been pulling feathers a bit but settled into the new coop nicely.
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Jun 12, 2020 15:26
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Does anyone know if maple shavings are bad for chickens? I have generated a ton as I am building some maple furniture and could use it for nest box bedding, litter etc. I didn't think it would be a problem but never hurts to check.
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Jun 12, 2020 16:28
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 First egg, next to a shop bought one. 
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Jun 12, 2020 16:33
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Nettle Soup posted:
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Jun 12, 2020 17:14
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Aramoro posted:After some delays brough on by the old COVID we have finally got our chickens for our back garden. 3 rescue hens from a farm a bit away. They're settling in just now getting used to the lay of the land really. We have named Ada, Grace and Hedy. Good names and they're adorable. Look forward to see how they get on with their new lives.
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Jun 12, 2020 19:50
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Nettle Soup posted:
Niiiice. That, is also your most expensive egg.
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Jun 12, 2020 19:51
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spookygonk posted:Good names and they're adorable. Look forward to see how they get on with their new lives. Thanks! There's a bit of a feather pulling issue just now hut hopefully that's just a bit of travel stress and it doesn't develop into anything worse.
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Jun 12, 2020 22:06
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Joburg posted:My hens (buffs, brahmas, Easter eggers, and one Wyandotte) are generally pretty quiet. The EE rooster we had crowed a lot and the Welsummers I gave to my mom talk ALL THE TIME but they aren’t very loud. One of my ameraucanas will just low-key chatter constantly at you. The other ameraucana and the two barred rocks are only slightly less talky, except for Fluffy. She has this thing where she will go up to the porch, and just holler for a couple minutes, every day. My buffs and the red are having their voices break. They'll still baby-peep at me, but otherwise are practicing adult sounds at each other. On the one hand I'm happy to be on the way to more eggs, on the other hand all three of them have been such cuddly babies that I wish it wasn't ending.
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Jun 16, 2020 01:11
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Alright! The roosters are on their way out Wednesday evening. They take that long trip to the Freezer Camp. I’m holding on to the hens until mid July because they are quieter and if they didn’t have to compete with the aggressiveness if the roosters for food they should be able to put on some more weight. The birds are 10 weeks old and will be 10 1/2 on processing day. I’m hoping for an average carcass weight of 4.5 lbs but we will see.  Edit: I have 15 roosters and 12 hens in this batch. The reason they are going now is my friend has a batch going in and can add more birds without an issue. They are also really loud trying to out crow each other and extremely aggressive towards each other and the hens. They like me and follow me around and hop up into my hands to get food like they did when they were chicks. But they fight enough to draw blood from each other. Errant Gin Monks fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 04:12
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Broody Station Alpha is fully operationalized ... guys... So... I learned some lessons this time around. First one hen (Tina) went broody, then another (Snowy). I have three nesting boxes in my coop, and five other hens. For some reason I was hoping they could carry things to term, as it were, in there, as my dog cage I used for this previously was otherwise occupied by a dog. Obviously, this was wrong. Even with marking the original eggs, there was so much hassle and competition for the boxes that they ended up sometimes sitting in the wrong box. Eggs were getting shoved out of the boxes and broken, including one that was far along. Then a third hen, Chester, went broody and it really hit the fan. Someone ended up laying a shell-less egg in her box which not only made a mess but seems to have caused my rooster to think that she needed to be driven out of the group; sadly I didn't see any option but to let him go, he was vicious (never had acted anything like that in the past.) I had really wanted to avoid touching things as it was basically 21 days at this point and you're really not supposed to mess with things after 17 days or so, but I felt I really had no choice at this point - my lack of action had created an untenable situation. This spurred me to go get another dog cage and set up the broody station, but as I was moving them over I noticed that one egg had already hatched under Tina (the darker one), a tiny little puffball. In for a penny, in for a pound, so I moved them over regardless and just hoped they would settle in. They did, but Snowy ended up moving in with Tina and leaving her eggs uncovered. I took them and put them under Chester, still up in the nesting boxes, but due to the stress and being attacked by the rooster, that night she decided she was no longer broody, so those were cold and kaput the next morning. So due to the staggered laying times, all the issues with leaving the eggs uncovered, being broken, moving them when you were not supposed to, etc, it looks like Snowy and Tina are going to be moms to... one new chick. None of the other eggs ended up hatching and I'll need to remove them. I honestly didn't want or need any more chickens so adding just one more is probably the best outcome, but I really feel bad about how this has gone. I'll eat eggs all day long but once they get sat on I do feel a responsibility to help things go as well as they possibly can and I really failed that this time. Not to mention my rooster is gone now as well. I do think it's cute how both Snowy and Tina are co-moms, though - was not expecting that but they are both cooperating with showing the chick around, keeping it warm, etc. So if you do get a broody hen either get her set up with her own area to be sure things go well, or dissuade her from broodyness. Don't just let it go and hope it will work out OK.  A big sigh of relief from me when I saw them teaching the chick how to use the horizontal nipple waterer. (The one to the left is a vertical nipple one with Nutri-Drench in it, just in case.)  And where the food is. Mozi fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 19:36
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5er posted:She has this thing where she will go up to the porch, and just holler for a couple minutes, every day. I have a chicken who just decides to climb up on something high and holler every once in awhile. It's not egg-related so I wonder if she has decided to take over rooster duties.
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Jun 17, 2020 09:04
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Enfys posted:I have a chicken who just decides to climb up on something high and holler every once in awhile. It's not egg-related so I wonder if she has decided to take over rooster duties. Our youngest two are pretty quiet all day until it gets around to sunset and then they go all squeaky and screechy and try and climb up everything.
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Jun 17, 2020 12:39
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currently our hens are quiet until they kick over their feeders then they yell till we come and stand them back up again.
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Jun 17, 2020 13:02
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I learned a lot of lessons about broody hens too. I’ve had 3 broody buff Orpington hens so far this year. Two started on the same day and one was a week later. I gave the lagger 2 of the earlier eggs to make things easy. I moved them all to one pen with their own boxes and everything worked until hatching day... the hens didn’t know whose chick was whose so they were fighting, one chick got hurt in the melee. I separated the hens and just randomly assigned chicks to them and that seemed to work out. The hurt chick couldn’t use one leg for a couple days but it healed and is now totally mobile. (I almost culled it, so glad I didn’t!) After a week and a half of bonding with their chicks, I now have 3 hens with 2 chicks each all running around in a fenced yard. They are adorable! Last night it looked like we might have another broody hen but I got rid of our rooster last week. I will have to source some fertile eggs if she stays broody.
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Jun 17, 2020 13:45
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D'awww!  Any pix of hens & chicks?
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Jun 17, 2020 13:50
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Joburg posted:I learned a lot of lessons about broody hens too. It's a learning experience for sure. FWIW hens will continue to lay fertile eggs for 10-14 days after mating so you can probably still use your eggs for the newer broody if you want to.
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Jun 17, 2020 14:46
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I collect the eggs from under our broody hen every day. Then I reach under her again with my palm up and let her wiggle her naked warm chicken titties against my hand for a bit. It's a pleasant sensation.
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Jun 17, 2020 17:09
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I can’t seem to get my pics to post. I’m on mobile and I try to insert from my library but it’s not working. The message says Imgur API error. 
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Jun 17, 2020 18:40
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Roosters are gone. It’s much quieter here without 15 roosters beating each other to death. I get them all back on Friday so we will see what they weigh in at.
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Jun 17, 2020 23:46
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Coop update  I made a solar powered battery operated system for the coop. It's got a raspberry pi running a temp sensor and also a linear actuator to open and close the door. It's close enough to the house that it's on wifi so I can control it all remotely. That first egg gets ever more expensive.
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Jun 18, 2020 00:35
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Wow, that's a really cool set up and some impressive DIY skills
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Jun 18, 2020 09:51
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That Works posted:That first egg gets ever more expensive. I think our first egg cost about a grand. Worth it though. We're using a ChickenGuard to open and close the coop but living in Scotland it does't really get dark enough to close the coop before 10pm so we're closing it manually just now, and keeping it closed until 6am because it's light at 4am just now and the chickens dont like that.
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Jun 18, 2020 10:10
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Aramoro posted:I think our first egg cost about a grand. Worth it though. Mine get rowdy if they aren't out by 5am at the absolute latest, which I am really appreciating 
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Jun 18, 2020 12:09
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That Works posted:That first egg gets ever more expensive.
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Jun 18, 2020 14:38
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That Works posted:Coop update I am very interested in as detailed of an explanation as you want to give about what you did. Im considering doing something similar by winter.
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Jun 18, 2020 14:43
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Source4Leko posted:I am very interested in as detailed of an explanation as you want to give about what you did. Im considering doing something similar by winter. breaky@gmail.com I'll keep my email up there a bit if you want to contact me directly for more details. First thing to think about is power. Do you want to run it off of your house power (120V AC)? Or do you want it to be fully off grid (solar + battery)? At the heart of this you want a 12V linear actuator to physically open and close the door. You'll need one with a stroke length long enough for your door. I got a 12" stroke length, 12V DC actuator off of amazon. It's not sold there right now, but you can find other versions there or on ebay. If you are running this from 120VAC then you'll need to figure out how to drive a 12V DC system from that input. I didn't do this so I can't help there, but it should be simple. I did a solar powered system with a 12V deep cycle marine battery. For running a panel you'll also want a solar charge controller. There are a bunch of different versions of these, you'll want to think about cost and how much current you'll actually be using / needing. My coop is in a shady area so I bought a way too big panel for what I actually need because it's not ever going to get much light until winter once the leaves are gone. So now that power is sorted you could just wire up a switch and walk to the coop and turn the switch to raise or lower the door. I actually need to retrofit this onto my build still. If you don't want to walk outside to flip a switch (why would you when its 20F and snowing) then you need to control it remotely. There's simpler ways to set up a single remote control switch than what I did, but I wanted to do more than just control the door, like set up temp sensors and have those inputs dictate things like turning on water defrosters etc. So for that, I used a Raspberry Pi zero W which has a wifi antenna on it already. Your coop will need to be in wifi range. Using the Pi, I can remotely access it over wifi through several methods (ssh for starters). The Pi has GPIO output pins which basically you write a short script that tells the Pi to send current to pin #x. Problems here are that your battery system is 12V DC and the Linear actuator is 12V DC and the Raspberry Pi runs 5v and 3.3v pins. Good thing for us there are relays that can take 3.3v input signal and use that to activate a 12V circuit. For the linear actuator to reverse the direction it travels, you have to reverse the polarity, so a relay isn't quite good enough and you can use a DC motor controller module instead. Bonus here is that the DC motor controller also has a 5v output, so you can use that to directly power the Pi without needing a separate stepdown converter to go from 12 to 5v. K so now you want to write a script that sends power to pin X on the pi for 40 seconds (it takes 30s for the linear actuator to fully extend or retract). Write exact same script but have it activate a different pin on the Pi, which is wired to a different pin on the DC motor controller. This will cause the motor to run 40s in the opposite direction. Other random stuff includes a 12V fusebox and bus to wire new circuits from. Temperature stuff is a whole different ball of wax and I've only gotten it to just work and spit out raw data. Lots more to figure out there but there's a link below for what I used. DC motor controller: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CC8XI60/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Linear actuator: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HNTPB87/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Solar charge controller (super cheap, if you're doing a system with more current needed I'd look into more efficient MPPT controllers): https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B015S39PTU/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 12V Bus: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GBV2MHN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o08_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 PV panel: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HHDC6NQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Temp sensor: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B004G53D54/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s03?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Helpful link for setting up the temp sensor: https://www.circuitbasics.com/raspberry-pi-ds18b20-temperature-sensor-tutorial/ Helpful video for scripting that I used to write the door open / door close scripts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41IO4Qe5Jzw (That guys videos are quite well done IMO) Solar panels and batteries are expensive. You'll want to look into that on your own to figure out what works for your setup. I did overkill on the panel here, but have other plans for solar stuff later on.
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Jun 18, 2020 18:04
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Thank you for all that! I may email you later with some more questions but I will sit and read that more thoroughly once I have time to read it and let it sink in today or tomorrow. Your setup is really impressive and I'm jealous.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:01
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I bought mine from chickendoors.com as I am not handy and they have one with a light sensor that controls when it opens and closes (15m after sunup/sundown generally) and it works really well. Might be able to incorporate that idea as well, I'm not sure how it works though.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:59
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I've got a similar setup (RasPi Zero W on a solar charger) for monitoring my beehives. This is the solar panel I used: https://www.amazon.com/ECO-WORTHY-I...92512728&sr=8-4 So far they've worked pretty well, though I replaced the wires with heavier gauge ones. I also managed to fry two out of five charge controllers but that's because I suck at electronics, the others have worked well enough so far. EDIT: To calculate how much power you need, you'll need to know your current draw and what voltage it's applied at. I don't have any power-hungry linear actuators just sensors, so I only consume about 200mA. Current * Voltage = Power 0.2A * 12V = 2.4 W This might seem like a huge oversize (25W > 2.4W) however I wanted mine to continue functioning all day, even at night, and able to survive through the winter and multiple cloudy days in a row. So you have winter daylight factor (9hrs/24hrs), solar inefficiency factor (light coming in at an oblique angle), and the number of consecutive days you want to function, and if anything I'm probably a little undersized. DarkHorse fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 21:41
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My wife made an instagram when we got the chickens, I didn't realize she put up a vid of it operating. Bonus lots of other pics of chickens there too. https://www.instagram.com/p/CBkx0rvgafb/?igshid=m8om1hnmfnzb
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Jun 18, 2020 22:11
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Is angel wing seriously fixed by just binding the feathers correctly? What causes that to happen in the first place? (ducks)
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Jun 18, 2020 22:51
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Is angel wing seriously fixed by just binding the feathers correctly? What causes that to happen in the first place? (ducks) I've heard it's caused by nutritional deficiencies (or maybe an excess of a particular one), often seen by ducks fed lots and lots of bread
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Jun 19, 2020 01:04
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DarkHorse posted:I've heard it's caused by nutritional deficiencies (or maybe an excess of a particular one), often seen by ducks fed lots and lots of bread We've been pretty much feeding them exclusively https://www.purinamills.com/chicken-feed/products/detail/purina-duck-feed-pellets Sometimes grapes and peas or what not. Zero bread. We're wrapping their wings up since that apparently can help but they hate it lol
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Jun 19, 2020 05:25
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I've read that it's caused by the weight of the primary flight feathers causing stress on the wing muscles and ligaments that aren't yet strong enough to support those big bad feathers! If your ducks are pretty young, this would make sense.
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Jun 19, 2020 18:45
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