Mistakes we have made . . .

...th the chickens we did not want to provide habitat for raccoons. 2. Mixing Chicken Breeds Speaking of chickens, a friend of ours who grew up on a farm confirmed that “chickens are racists”. Like talk radio hosts, hens will pick on anyone who is different. In our case, our green egg laying and weird looking Araucana gets the crap beaten out of her by the Rhode Island Red and one of the Barred Rocks. If I had it do do all over again, I’d get four Ba...

Read…

Do Hens Make Noise?

...ted wake-up call, but so far nobody has complained. Being naive first time chicken owners, the first time we heard this sound caught us by surprise. We suspected that it’s the result of discomfort from squeezing out an egg, or some wonder of selective breeding, a way to announce to the poultry farmer, “Hey, time to collect an egg!” In fact, research presented by University of Sheffield animal scientists Tommaso Pizzari and Tim R. Birkhead, in an a...

Read…

Hen Pecked in Missoula

...Apologies, for the poultry fixation this past month, but we had to link to this story. It seems Missoula Montana is currently in the midst of a urban chicken controversy. New West Network’s Anne Medley and Jonathan Stumpf profile the dust-up in this video....

Read…

Happy World Car Free Day

...ride their bikes to school because of all the SUV drivers like you playing chicken with pedestrians to see who can beat each other across the intersection. I could keep ranting, mentioning the things we all know, the childhood asthma rates of our polluted city, the melting polar ice caps and dying polar bears, the 39,000 traffic fatalities on American roads, and all those folks dying in Iraq to supply the oil that feeds your addiction. So perhaps...

Read…

To each hen her own egg

...eir eggs yet. Closer surveillance is required! *** And while we’re talking chickens — Update on chicken integration: Regular readers may remember that we had to integrate Handsome, the surviving elder hen from our last flock, with this new flock. This involved many stages, but no violence, thankfully. At first, the new flock shunned Handsome. Handsome, a five-year old Ameraucana, who’d had only us humans for company for months, seemed sad. Then th...

Read…