I've been putting it off for a while, but a few weekends ago I got started on the latest build project for the chickens. We have three pairs of birds in small pens lately, and two of these pens are pretty makeshift: a "fly-pen" inside the Polish pen, and a floppy, flimsy, chickenwire-and-T-post contraption built off of the Polish pen. These are breeding pairs, so they do need separate housing, but what they're got right now is just not very good. So I will be building a small compound of four attached pens in the southwest corner of the chicken yard.
The corner in question is a fairly nice area. There's a tree with a narrow canopy at that corner, which provides the birds with some shade, if not a whole lot of shelter from the rain. It's also the high end of the yard, so it doesn't get as muddy. But at this time of year, the ground has dried out, and it is like iron. Over the first three days of my project, I spent many hours digging four measly post holes.
The pen design calls for a free-standing wall along one long side, which will tie in at one end to the existing fence, and at the other end will have a connecting arm of fencing to tie in to the other fence. From there, it can be subdivided into four side-by-side sections. But that free-standing wall needs to be fairly sturdy to stand up to winter winds, in addition to providing anchor points for each of the four small gates. I decided that the best way to achieve this would be to sink four eight-foot 4"X4" posts thirty inches into the ground, then link them with 2"X4" toprails and bottom rails. Additional support for the short walls would be provided by good old T-posts, which can be rammed into the ground by brute force, but first we had to get the 4X4s in place. And when I took my first stab at the ground, and the post-hole digger bucked straight up like a bronco, I knew I was in for it.
Water, of course, is the universal solvent. On that first day, when I realized that even the Hulk couldn't dig those holes before Christmas, it seemed like a great idea to fill the shallow dimples that I'd made with water, and leave it to sit for a while. And it did indeed seep down and soften the ground; as of the third morning, I got two of the holes down to my goal of thirty inches. But I underestimated the amount of clay down there. Of that thirty inches, twenty-eight of it was solid clay. And clay really, truly, doesn't want to drain. The water table is seventy feet down, and the clay seals itself around any pocket of surface water greedily, refusing it let it trickle down and rejoin its subterranean parent. In the process of digging, I managed to work the standing water into the dirt I chipped free, and pulled it out of the holes in the form of soupy mud, but afterwards I still had six inches of water in the holes.
It's difficult to dig in a chicken yard. Chickens spy you headed someplace with anything in your hands, and they immediately come running to see what kind of food is involved. While ours are initially afraid of both the shovel and the digger, the minute you actually start digging, they mob your ankles. Every bit of dirt elevated from the hole is inspected frantically for worms. They want to dig through the dirt pile and kick it all over the yard, which would be helpful if I were trying to level the yard. Meanwhile the boss rooster is orbiting both the hole and the dirt pile at high speed, torn between the desire to impress the hens with his ability to procure food, and his own greed. Baron did do me a favor, though, when he nearly fell into the first hole while I was digging. At that point it occurred to me--duh--that a deep hole full of muddy water equals a death trap for a chicken. I covered each hole with scraps of chicken wire in between digging sessions, and managed to avoid any casualties.
After several days, the holes were finished. And then . . . the storm came through. Cold, drumming, gusting, soaking rain that properly belonged in November. On the fifth day, when the skies finally cleared, I trooped out and took the covers off the holes, to discover them nearly brim-full of opaque, muddy water.
In hindsight, I was darned lucky that we did have so much clay. The walls of my holes held without slumping or eroding so much as an inch. As I bailed the water out using a quart Mason jar on a string, I contemplated how easily I could have been re-digging the things instead. The very thought made my blisters hurt. The next day we placed the posts, trued them up, and filled in the holes inch by laborious inch, tamping like mad. Clay doesn't tamp well. Poke it with a stick, and it tries to climb up it, then doesn't want to give the stick back. Tamping creates a topography like the mountain ranges a six-year-old draws, all jagged teeth and vanishingly deep valleys. Clay also sticks to the shovel in a thoroughly annoying fashion. And meanwhile, there are the perpetual, peripatetic chickens . . . .
The posts are in place, the T-posts are in place, the cinder-block rests for the shelters are in place and (seemingly) level. I am moving on towards building those shelters (large wooden shipping crates from a salvage yard, hooray salvage!) and then will put the rails up and fence it all in. Phew.
Polly
The Roving Rototiller
Monday, May 30, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Valentine's chicks
After a long enough wait to make everyone a little nervous--twenty-four days!--Valentine finally has chicks. I don't know what the delay was all about; normally you can expect a hatch at twenty-one days of incubation, especially under a hen, but for whatever reason Valentine's kids took their own sweet time getting here. Fortunately for them, Mother Knew Best, and didn't let a piddling detail like a deadline get on her nerves. And here is her reward: four sturdy, fat little fuzzballs showing her their full appreciation on Mother's Day, as only little kids can:
These chicks are not from eggs that Valentine laid . . . not that she cares. They are from our barred Rock hen Checkers, and the father is Jake, one of our blue Andalusians. The color genetics are going to be interesting this time around, I can tell. About the only thing that the two parents agree on is that blue modifies black.
Blue, in chicken coloration, is actually more of a steely gray; it's blue in the way that a Russian Blue cat is blue, which is to say, not exactly what you would call blue. But it's a very entertaining gene to work with. Basically, blue is a gene that modifies black coloration, and it's a dominant gene, so it shows its effects even if there's only one copy of it. If a chicken has no blue gene, then that lack is shown on a genetic diagram as bl+/bl+. That little plus sign doesn't actually mean plus, in genetics. Instead, it indicates consistency with wild type coloration. Chickens that are colored like their ancestors, the junglefowl, have no blue gene at all. Therefore, a bird lacking blue isn't just written as bl/bl, it's bl+/bl+, and a bird with one copy is Bl/bl+.
In a Bl/bl+ chicken, every place on the body that was going to be black, is blue instead. If, on the other hand, a chicken has two copies of the blue gene (Bl/Bl), then the result is a rather grubby white with random dark gray feathers mixed in. This coloration is called splash; I think that's rather appropriate, because it makes the chicken look like it's been doused in dirty dishwater.
Jake, being a blue Andalusian, is Bl/bl+ and he is shades of blue all over. Checkers, on the other hand, is a barred hen: basically a black bird, with a barring gene that gives her the white stripes. The barring gene is located on the Z chromosome, and because birds just have to be different, the female is the heterozygous gender (ZW) while the male is homozygous (ZZ). (In mammals, the male is heterozygous (XY) and the female homozygous (XX)). That means that Checkers only has one copy of the barring gene to donate, so each of these chicks has a 50% chance of having inherited the barring gene. And at this point, there's no definite way to tell which ones, if any, did. Barred Rock chicks are black with yellow tummies and a yellow splotch on the top of the head. Three of these have the splotch, but we'll just have to wait and see if that corresponds to barring! Even if it does, I anticipate "interference" from other genes from Jake's side of the family that would make the barring muddy, or alter how well it shows up on different parts of the body. I don't know if there is any such thing as a blue-barred chicken!
The chick to the far left in the photo above is a blue, and the two in the background look like darker versions of blue. The one in the foreground is black. The paler down on their bellies is just baby clothes and will go away when they feather out. It will be interesting to see what markings they all develop over the next few months! (And of course, we're praying that most of them are hens.)
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| Let's all sit on Mom! |
Blue, in chicken coloration, is actually more of a steely gray; it's blue in the way that a Russian Blue cat is blue, which is to say, not exactly what you would call blue. But it's a very entertaining gene to work with. Basically, blue is a gene that modifies black coloration, and it's a dominant gene, so it shows its effects even if there's only one copy of it. If a chicken has no blue gene, then that lack is shown on a genetic diagram as bl+/bl+. That little plus sign doesn't actually mean plus, in genetics. Instead, it indicates consistency with wild type coloration. Chickens that are colored like their ancestors, the junglefowl, have no blue gene at all. Therefore, a bird lacking blue isn't just written as bl/bl, it's bl+/bl+, and a bird with one copy is Bl/bl+.
In a Bl/bl+ chicken, every place on the body that was going to be black, is blue instead. If, on the other hand, a chicken has two copies of the blue gene (Bl/Bl), then the result is a rather grubby white with random dark gray feathers mixed in. This coloration is called splash; I think that's rather appropriate, because it makes the chicken look like it's been doused in dirty dishwater.
Jake, being a blue Andalusian, is Bl/bl+ and he is shades of blue all over. Checkers, on the other hand, is a barred hen: basically a black bird, with a barring gene that gives her the white stripes. The barring gene is located on the Z chromosome, and because birds just have to be different, the female is the heterozygous gender (ZW) while the male is homozygous (ZZ). (In mammals, the male is heterozygous (XY) and the female homozygous (XX)). That means that Checkers only has one copy of the barring gene to donate, so each of these chicks has a 50% chance of having inherited the barring gene. And at this point, there's no definite way to tell which ones, if any, did. Barred Rock chicks are black with yellow tummies and a yellow splotch on the top of the head. Three of these have the splotch, but we'll just have to wait and see if that corresponds to barring! Even if it does, I anticipate "interference" from other genes from Jake's side of the family that would make the barring muddy, or alter how well it shows up on different parts of the body. I don't know if there is any such thing as a blue-barred chicken!
The chick to the far left in the photo above is a blue, and the two in the background look like darker versions of blue. The one in the foreground is black. The paler down on their bellies is just baby clothes and will go away when they feather out. It will be interesting to see what markings they all develop over the next few months! (And of course, we're praying that most of them are hens.)
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Green eggs
Just throwing it out there: how many chicken egg colors can you name?
Well, everyone has seen brown eggs and white eggs in the supermarket. But there's a third color category that has never has caught on in the market, and I have yet to figure out why. It's the blue- or green-shelled egg. I have more fun with these eggs. When somebody asks if we have eggs available, and I pop open a carton, what's the first thing they notice? Not the cute little brown bantam eggs, not the glossy white Polish eggs, but "Oh my gosh, what laid those green ones?!"
Well, these girls do.
Meet Charger, Colleen, Bluebelle, Silver, Gladys, and Cadge. These girls are all Easter Eggers, which is a slightly more polite term than "mutts that just happen to lay eggs that are blue, green, or olive." All but Silver are hatchery chicks; Silver is a second-generation bird, the result of our brief fling at keeping an Easter Egger rooster in with the main laying flock. Sadly, Brutus did not get along well with boss rooster Elwood, so he went to a friend.
I just can't understand why Easter Eggers haven't taken off as the Next Big Thing in the egg production business. (Not that I would wish battery nesting on any bird.) They're excellent layers: although not quite as prolific as the White Leghorn, our girls average five eggs a week . . . each. Are green-hued shells really that off-putting to the consumer? Not from what I can see. Even Easter Egger half-breeds are excellent producers. Shoe, one of our oldest hens at five years, is still laying regularly, and her eggs are of the same high quality as the younger birds'.
But then, I am thoroughly biased. I keep these birds as pets; the eggs are just a pleasant side benefit. My very first hen was a barred Easter Egger named Nova. She looked exactly like a production Barred Rock, except for her green legs and the lime-green eggs she laid. At the time I had no idea that she was an Easter Egger, so that first green egg came as a considerable shock. For years after that we would pester Mom to fix "green eggs and ham!" for breakfast. The novelty never really wore off.
One of the most entertaining aspects of this breed is the multitude of feather colors that they come in. White, brown, gray, blue, gold, red, black; barring, speckling, or none; striped or counter-colored hackles. As you can see from the photos, anything goes. Things get even weirder when an "EE" is crossbred with something else. We have a hen who is jet black and has a single comb. She looks much like a black Andalusian, which makes sense because her daddy is an Andalusian. But she lays a jade-green egg.
The blue egg gene pops up everywhere it can, since it's what is termed a dominant gene (meaning that even if a bird has only one copy of the gene, it will still manifest). Like with white eggs, a blue egg's shell carries that pigment throughout its thickness. By comparison, a brown egg only has brown pigment applied to its outermost layers. When the blue egg gene is combined with brown egg genes, the resulting shell colors range from green to olive. So a green egg is basically a blue shell, overpainted with a little brown; an olive egg is one overpainted with a lot of brown.
It's their personalities, though, that get me every time. Charger is all up in everyone's business, and once chased a cottontail out of the chicken yard. Colleen is Little Miss Bossy. Bluebelle is the Night Warden, keeping order in the barn after lights-out with stern baritone clucking and cawing at any disturbance. Silver stomps around making sure the younger birds aren't getting into trouble. Gladys will hop up onto your shoulder. And Cadge . . . well, she's always hoping for a handout. And they're friendly. When I come into the chicken yard, the EE's come at the gallop, heads low and intent while their legs and wings bounce in every direction. They are intelligent birds; when shown something new, other breeds cackle and back away while the EE's come in and check it out. (Since it's usually food, this serves them well.)
Anyway, if you are thinking about getting a few chickens for your backyard, I would heartily recommend some Easter Eggers, although you would be in equally good hands . . . err, claws . . . with Ameraucanas. Between the colors of the eggs and the birds themselves, their personalities, and the added plus of hybrid vigor--the unquestionable advantage to being a mutt--you'd be hard put to find a better "starter" bird. And if you get hooked for life on chickens . . . well, don't say I didn't warn you. :)
Well, everyone has seen brown eggs and white eggs in the supermarket. But there's a third color category that has never has caught on in the market, and I have yet to figure out why. It's the blue- or green-shelled egg. I have more fun with these eggs. When somebody asks if we have eggs available, and I pop open a carton, what's the first thing they notice? Not the cute little brown bantam eggs, not the glossy white Polish eggs, but "Oh my gosh, what laid those green ones?!"
Well, these girls do.
 |
| Charger |
Meet Charger, Colleen, Bluebelle, Silver, Gladys, and Cadge. These girls are all Easter Eggers, which is a slightly more polite term than "mutts that just happen to lay eggs that are blue, green, or olive." All but Silver are hatchery chicks; Silver is a second-generation bird, the result of our brief fling at keeping an Easter Egger rooster in with the main laying flock. Sadly, Brutus did not get along well with boss rooster Elwood, so he went to a friend.
 |
| Colleen |
But then, I am thoroughly biased. I keep these birds as pets; the eggs are just a pleasant side benefit. My very first hen was a barred Easter Egger named Nova. She looked exactly like a production Barred Rock, except for her green legs and the lime-green eggs she laid. At the time I had no idea that she was an Easter Egger, so that first green egg came as a considerable shock. For years after that we would pester Mom to fix "green eggs and ham!" for breakfast. The novelty never really wore off.
 |
| Bluebelle |
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| Silver |
The blue egg gene pops up everywhere it can, since it's what is termed a dominant gene (meaning that even if a bird has only one copy of the gene, it will still manifest). Like with white eggs, a blue egg's shell carries that pigment throughout its thickness. By comparison, a brown egg only has brown pigment applied to its outermost layers. When the blue egg gene is combined with brown egg genes, the resulting shell colors range from green to olive. So a green egg is basically a blue shell, overpainted with a little brown; an olive egg is one overpainted with a lot of brown.
 |
| Gladys |
Despite its popularity, the Easter Egger is not considered a proper breed. EEs are something of an offshoot of a couple of genuine, recognized breeds: the Araucana and the Ameraucana. Araucanas hail from South America and are tailless, have long tufts of feathers in front of their ears (not to be confused with the "muffs and beard" that Colleen and Bluebelle are sporting above), and lay a blue egg. Ameraucanas carry some of the same genes, but not all. They have muffs and a beard--they must, in order to qualify for breed standard--and they generally lay either a blue or a green egg. But the EE is the result of hybridizing Ameraucanas with other birds, and there isn't much of a standard. An EE often does have muffs and beard, but not always. She generally has green legs and a pea comb, but not every time. Their colors don't breed true: if you breed two brown EEs, you might end up with some real surprises in the chicks, such as white or black with brown. And the eggs an EE hen lays could be blue, green, olive, brown, or pink. It's a lot of fun picking up the eggs at night! Besides, depending on what other shell-color genes went into the mix, your green eggs might be flecked or speckled with brown, or finely stippled with white. After seeing a carton full of color, plain old white eggs seem very boring.
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| Cadge |
Anyway, if you are thinking about getting a few chickens for your backyard, I would heartily recommend some Easter Eggers, although you would be in equally good hands . . . err, claws . . . with Ameraucanas. Between the colors of the eggs and the birds themselves, their personalities, and the added plus of hybrid vigor--the unquestionable advantage to being a mutt--you'd be hard put to find a better "starter" bird. And if you get hooked for life on chickens . . . well, don't say I didn't warn you. :)
Mahogany has chicks!
At last, the long wait is over. Mahogany has hatched out five beautiful chicks, and is so proud, her little feathery feet scarcely touch the ground. Here they are:
The first chick was the one on the far left. Within twenty-four hours, the other three in that photo had joined it, perky and strong. Number Five, however, gave us a scare. Although its egg was set at the same time as the rest, it hatched a day and a half late. By this point, the first chick was coming up on three days old, and that is as long as a new chick can go before it has to eat. A chick reabsorbs the remnant of its egg yolk before hatching, and uses it as energy for the next few days. This allows the chick and the mother hen to stay in the nest and wait for slower siblings to finish hatching. When the oldest chick starts getting hungry, it begins to fuss and try to climb out of the box, signalling its mother that it's time to go find some food. Any eggs or chicks left in the nest at this point are on their own. So not twelve hours after it had hatched, Number Five was left behind in the nest, too weak and young to follow the rest as they left the nest at last for breakfast.
When a chick first hatches, it spends the next twenty-four hours doing nothing very much except sleep and recover from the hard work of hatching. It's certainly in no condition to walk--it can barely stand! So poor little Five was really in a spot. When I came out to feed that morning, I discovered it sacked out in the nest, already getting quite chilled but too sleepy and sluggish to peep for Mother. So I brought it inside, and set it up in the brooder. The whole day, that kid did nothing but sleep, tucked in underneath the feather duster with the heat lamp warming its little rump. It would wake up and peep conversationally once in a while, then zonk out again. It wasn't hungry, it wasn't thirsty. Finally night fell and I took it out to the barn, where Mahogany had put herself and the other chicks to bed in the nest box. I tucked Five in under her wing, whereupon it immediately perked up and began cheeping at her: "Mama! I had a big day. I got abducted by a big alien, an' it flew away with me, an' there was this bright light, an' funny sounds, an' an' an' . . . ." Mahogany listened with the most bemused expression on her face, beak tilted down towards the tiny voice buried in her feathers: "Yes, dear. Really? Well now." The other chicks slept right through it.
Thankfully, since then Five has caught up with its siblings, and is currently the plumpest of the bunch. We had a little trouble the second and third nights, when it couldn't figure out how to get back up the ramp into the nest box, but it's figured that trick out now. I have to say "it", because we really can't tell what gender any of the chicks are yet. As they grow, we'll get some idea. Murphy's Law being what it is, I have to suspect that this chick will turn out to be a rooster . . . after all that fuss saving his fluffy little behind. Ah, chickens.
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| Mahogany with chicks one through four. She is showing them something to eat. |
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| Chick number five, who was hiding behind Mum. |
The first chick was the one on the far left. Within twenty-four hours, the other three in that photo had joined it, perky and strong. Number Five, however, gave us a scare. Although its egg was set at the same time as the rest, it hatched a day and a half late. By this point, the first chick was coming up on three days old, and that is as long as a new chick can go before it has to eat. A chick reabsorbs the remnant of its egg yolk before hatching, and uses it as energy for the next few days. This allows the chick and the mother hen to stay in the nest and wait for slower siblings to finish hatching. When the oldest chick starts getting hungry, it begins to fuss and try to climb out of the box, signalling its mother that it's time to go find some food. Any eggs or chicks left in the nest at this point are on their own. So not twelve hours after it had hatched, Number Five was left behind in the nest, too weak and young to follow the rest as they left the nest at last for breakfast.
When a chick first hatches, it spends the next twenty-four hours doing nothing very much except sleep and recover from the hard work of hatching. It's certainly in no condition to walk--it can barely stand! So poor little Five was really in a spot. When I came out to feed that morning, I discovered it sacked out in the nest, already getting quite chilled but too sleepy and sluggish to peep for Mother. So I brought it inside, and set it up in the brooder. The whole day, that kid did nothing but sleep, tucked in underneath the feather duster with the heat lamp warming its little rump. It would wake up and peep conversationally once in a while, then zonk out again. It wasn't hungry, it wasn't thirsty. Finally night fell and I took it out to the barn, where Mahogany had put herself and the other chicks to bed in the nest box. I tucked Five in under her wing, whereupon it immediately perked up and began cheeping at her: "Mama! I had a big day. I got abducted by a big alien, an' it flew away with me, an' there was this bright light, an' funny sounds, an' an' an' . . . ." Mahogany listened with the most bemused expression on her face, beak tilted down towards the tiny voice buried in her feathers: "Yes, dear. Really? Well now." The other chicks slept right through it.
Thankfully, since then Five has caught up with its siblings, and is currently the plumpest of the bunch. We had a little trouble the second and third nights, when it couldn't figure out how to get back up the ramp into the nest box, but it's figured that trick out now. I have to say "it", because we really can't tell what gender any of the chicks are yet. As they grow, we'll get some idea. Murphy's Law being what it is, I have to suspect that this chick will turn out to be a rooster . . . after all that fuss saving his fluffy little behind. Ah, chickens.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Secret agent bugs
One of the hazards of adding birds to a flock is the possibility that someone might get sick, either the new bird or some of the flock. Of course nobody consciously chooses a sick bird to add. It happens by accident, and unfortunately it happens easily, because quite a few poultry diseases are capable of "lurking". An outwardly healthy bird may be harboring more than one surprise, and few things are worse than discovering that the new kid on the block has brought enough for everybody, as it were.
I am so nervous about diseases that run under the radar that Quercus has never been integrated with the main flock. The coccidia that he developed at three weeks old told me that I'd taken in a small peeping ecosystem, and I swore to myself that I would be very, very careful with this bird. The coccidia, arrgh, did make its way into the main flock after all, but so far has been little more than a nuisance. I wince with every new batch of chicks that hits the ground, though, and fret over them until they get past the danger window.
Then, last November, Quirk broke with scaly leg mite. I flipped out. His legs had been fine for nearly a year, and all of a sudden the scales began rucking up over spongy, crumbly growths. We stomped on the situation good and hard: since he wasn't a laying hen and wasn't a meal, Ivermectin time baby! A few weeks later the lesions were gone, but given the tenacious nature of the mite, and the blowup out of nowhere, I can't really believe that the mites are vanquished. No doubt they've gone back to a carrier state. I now inspect legs in the barn a couple evenings a month, dreading to see the mites appear.
I'm not the least bit surprised about the coccidia and the mites. That feral flock adds and subtracts stray birds all the time, healthy and sick. A rather tarnished ray of sunshine in the situation is that without human intervention, the feral flock practices survival of the fittest in its most elemental form: when a new bug comes through, susceptible birds sicken and some die, while the resistant ones survive. It selects for hardiness, and it does it old-school: no medications, no sympathy, no second chances. But the thing about hardiness is that it's rather fussy. There are three major points to remember:
Quirk has lived long enough without symptoms to make me less concerned about many of the diseases on the list, but I still worry about Marek's disease (range paralysis), which is a viral disease that attacks the nerve tissue and is famous for lying doggo in the body for years before making its presence known. Marek's is alive and well in the feral flock, flaring up periodically in young birds and older carriers. Marek's can even travel on stray feathers from a carrier bird, and we have several older hens who like to eat feathers, so during the molting season I spend a lot of time picking up shed feathers and making sure that Quirk's enclosure stays where the prevailing wind will sweep any stray bits away from the others.
The best defense is a good offense: quarantine. Generally it is recommended to quarantine new birds completely for a full month, and watch them with extreme care. Even when it comes time to begin introducing them to the main flock, it may be practical (if rather cold-hearted) to first introduce them to a few expendable, more susceptible birds for another month. This gives most diseases plenty of time to show up (except for a few jokers in the deck, like Marek's). Knowing the source of your new birds is another important defense. A "closed" flock (one that doesn't add new birds) is safer than an "open" one. Likewise, birds that attend shows or otherwise interact with unfamiliar chickens are at higher risk for exposure. Day-old chicks from a reputable hatchery are another means of adding birds that are disease-free.
<chuckle> When I started this post, I thought that I would only discuss subclinical disease, but of course one train of thought leads to another, and there's a lot more to disease control than simply being aware that some bugs are good at hiding from you. With that thought in mind, I may just have to come back to this!
I am so nervous about diseases that run under the radar that Quercus has never been integrated with the main flock. The coccidia that he developed at three weeks old told me that I'd taken in a small peeping ecosystem, and I swore to myself that I would be very, very careful with this bird. The coccidia, arrgh, did make its way into the main flock after all, but so far has been little more than a nuisance. I wince with every new batch of chicks that hits the ground, though, and fret over them until they get past the danger window.
Then, last November, Quirk broke with scaly leg mite. I flipped out. His legs had been fine for nearly a year, and all of a sudden the scales began rucking up over spongy, crumbly growths. We stomped on the situation good and hard: since he wasn't a laying hen and wasn't a meal, Ivermectin time baby! A few weeks later the lesions were gone, but given the tenacious nature of the mite, and the blowup out of nowhere, I can't really believe that the mites are vanquished. No doubt they've gone back to a carrier state. I now inspect legs in the barn a couple evenings a month, dreading to see the mites appear.
I'm not the least bit surprised about the coccidia and the mites. That feral flock adds and subtracts stray birds all the time, healthy and sick. A rather tarnished ray of sunshine in the situation is that without human intervention, the feral flock practices survival of the fittest in its most elemental form: when a new bug comes through, susceptible birds sicken and some die, while the resistant ones survive. It selects for hardiness, and it does it old-school: no medications, no sympathy, no second chances. But the thing about hardiness is that it's rather fussy. There are three major points to remember:
- A hardy bird can look perfectly healthy and still be a carrier of diseases (the Typhoid Mary principle)
- The hardier the bird, the greater chance that he will have survived some really funky bugs, some of which he may now carry (the Eclectic Collector principle)
- Hardiness is not forever (Time wounds all heels)
Quirk has lived long enough without symptoms to make me less concerned about many of the diseases on the list, but I still worry about Marek's disease (range paralysis), which is a viral disease that attacks the nerve tissue and is famous for lying doggo in the body for years before making its presence known. Marek's is alive and well in the feral flock, flaring up periodically in young birds and older carriers. Marek's can even travel on stray feathers from a carrier bird, and we have several older hens who like to eat feathers, so during the molting season I spend a lot of time picking up shed feathers and making sure that Quirk's enclosure stays where the prevailing wind will sweep any stray bits away from the others.
The best defense is a good offense: quarantine. Generally it is recommended to quarantine new birds completely for a full month, and watch them with extreme care. Even when it comes time to begin introducing them to the main flock, it may be practical (if rather cold-hearted) to first introduce them to a few expendable, more susceptible birds for another month. This gives most diseases plenty of time to show up (except for a few jokers in the deck, like Marek's). Knowing the source of your new birds is another important defense. A "closed" flock (one that doesn't add new birds) is safer than an "open" one. Likewise, birds that attend shows or otherwise interact with unfamiliar chickens are at higher risk for exposure. Day-old chicks from a reputable hatchery are another means of adding birds that are disease-free.
<chuckle> When I started this post, I thought that I would only discuss subclinical disease, but of course one train of thought leads to another, and there's a lot more to disease control than simply being aware that some bugs are good at hiding from you. With that thought in mind, I may just have to come back to this!
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Hello, Quercus
Chickens have a tendency to multiply. As I've commented before, it's awfully easy to end up with a rooster, especially if you are soft-hearted (in extreme cases like mine, perhaps that would be soft-headed). But there's something funny about a flock of chickens that makes it behave like a very particular black hole. It exerts a mysterious pull that sucks in new chickens from the doggondest places.
There's a little town near my old workplace that has chosen a rather unusual distinguishing characteristic: its feral chicken population. (As with feral cats, the term is strangely apt. Officially, "feral chickens" refers to birds foraging and living successfully within the town, without human intervention. It does not mean bands of poultry hoodlums roving the streets and terrorizing the populace . . . but that depends on who you talk to.) The town points to its proud farming history, and traces its current feral flock of about 200 back three decades to a founding stock of one rooster and three hens that were allowed to roam. Since then the “bloodline” has been augmented by wandering birds and some outright escapees from backyard flocks, bringing in some startling and intriguing colors and shapes. (Crele gene on a White Leghorn base with red and black patches and some Japanese Bantam thrown in?) The birds wander all around the center of town, stopping traffic and even soliciting scraps from restaurant-goers sitting at outdoor tables. Everybody loves those chickens, or if they don’t, they keep very quiet about it.
So back in early December of 2009, during a vicious cold snap that brought snow to much of the area, I was practicing in a small-animal/exotics hospital that also takes in wildlife. Late in the morning, the phone rang. The receptionist covered the mouthpiece with her hand and waved at me.
"Can you take another chicken?"
“Sure.” (Never mind that at that point we had over sixty birds.) “Injured?”
“No, the hospital down the street says somebody has an orphaned chick.”
I glanced at the black sky outside, treetops whipping in the icy wind. “Weird. Okay, send it over.”
Over the next fifteen minutes or so I steadily upped the age of the bird in my mind’s eye, and messed with its species. No hen in its right mind would brood at this time of year, and the feed stores don't carry chicks during winter, so what could this thing be? Chickens are pretty unmistakable, but perhaps somebody had found a young duck? Maybe a gosling? Or no, this would be somebody’s end-of-summer feed-barn-clearance-sale chick, some poor leftover Rhode Island rooster on gangly legs and with no down left even on top of its head, only peeping because its voice hadn’t settled yet. Probably they lived in an area not zoned for chickens, and someone had complained. Yup. Undoubtedly.
I happened to be up front when the lady carrying the very small box arrived. "I found a chick," she said hesitantly.
Good grief, did she have a sparrow in there?
“Well, you’ve come to the right place!” the receptionist said encouragingly. I leaned over the box as the lady raised the lid.
Poing. The tiny ball of brown fluff popped its head up, squinting in the light. “Peep,” it said miserably. The egg tooth on the end of its beak sparkled briefly.
“I work in the Old Town,” the woman explained, “and I was walking out to my car when I heard peeping, and there he was standing in the driveway crying his eyes out. I looked everywhere for the mother but I couldn’t find her. I can’t raise him, he’ll never make it . . . .”
She needn’t have worried. I already had the bird in my hands. The chick was uninjured but quite cold; I would have taken him in even if he’d been missing a leg. The fact that he was alive at all was something of a between-holidays miracle. At two days old, as witnessed by that egg tooth, no chick could be expected to survive longer than half an hour in the frigid, rainy weather outside. For that matter, his siblings would be in some trouble even with their mother’s care, but there was nothing I could do about them.
Fortunately, I still had some stale chick feed sitting on the shelf over my desk. We set the little squirt up in a tank with a heating pad, a rice bag, a heat lamp, and the requisite feather duster. Within half an hour the bird had recovered enough to start shouting his abandonment to the entire building. But to our surprise, once he got a good look at the people moving around the room, he settled down and began to eat. Humans, apparently, were his new flock.
Throughout the next few months, the chick grew and thrived at our house, living in a homemade brooder on top of the washing machine. I was annoyed but unsurprised when he broke with a rather snippish strain of coccidia at his third week. It was resistant to the coccidiostat in his feed and the lab never did get it properly typed, but the chick bulled his way through it without so much as a dip in appetite. One of the more unusual things about him was the fact that after that first day, he never cried. Generally a solitary chick is an extremely unhappy bird, and will peep and call incessantly. This kid chirruped and talked to himself, but not once did we hear the "peep-peep-peep-PEEP-PEEP!" of a lonely chick. In the evenings he watched as we brought in Uncle Hoppy and Auntie Sonar, who also sleep in the laundry room, and in the mornings he would watch unperturbed as they were carried outside. He was a remarkably self-possessed little fellow. We named him Quercus, Quirk for short.
Since then, Quercus has grown into a remarkably handsome rooster, smallish and compact with a single comb and bright orange eyes. He has orange and yellow hackles and saddle feathers, red shoulders, orange chest and belly, green legs, a black tail, and a little black striping and spangling. He crows the first three bars of "Pennsylvania 6-5000," for some reason. Having been hand-raised his entire life, he is extremely tame towards my husband and myself; matter of fact, I had had some anxiety about that, because he is so used to humans that he isn't afraid. He did indeed go through the typical young-rooster-being-a-jerk phase, but it didn't last: after a little trial and error, he learned what "Stop that!" means and, rather amazingly, he listens. He spends his days in a chicken tractor on the lawn, yelling back and forth at Uncle Hoppy and the pair of Icelandics in the side yard, and every evening comes out of his hut to be taken indoors and put to bed in the laundry room.
So, another rooster has found his way into our home, and this one a real character. I think we were both lucky.
There's a little town near my old workplace that has chosen a rather unusual distinguishing characteristic: its feral chicken population. (As with feral cats, the term is strangely apt. Officially, "feral chickens" refers to birds foraging and living successfully within the town, without human intervention. It does not mean bands of poultry hoodlums roving the streets and terrorizing the populace . . . but that depends on who you talk to.) The town points to its proud farming history, and traces its current feral flock of about 200 back three decades to a founding stock of one rooster and three hens that were allowed to roam. Since then the “bloodline” has been augmented by wandering birds and some outright escapees from backyard flocks, bringing in some startling and intriguing colors and shapes. (Crele gene on a White Leghorn base with red and black patches and some Japanese Bantam thrown in?) The birds wander all around the center of town, stopping traffic and even soliciting scraps from restaurant-goers sitting at outdoor tables. Everybody loves those chickens, or if they don’t, they keep very quiet about it.
So back in early December of 2009, during a vicious cold snap that brought snow to much of the area, I was practicing in a small-animal/exotics hospital that also takes in wildlife. Late in the morning, the phone rang. The receptionist covered the mouthpiece with her hand and waved at me.
"Can you take another chicken?"
“Sure.” (Never mind that at that point we had over sixty birds.) “Injured?”
“No, the hospital down the street says somebody has an orphaned chick.”
I glanced at the black sky outside, treetops whipping in the icy wind. “Weird. Okay, send it over.”
Over the next fifteen minutes or so I steadily upped the age of the bird in my mind’s eye, and messed with its species. No hen in its right mind would brood at this time of year, and the feed stores don't carry chicks during winter, so what could this thing be? Chickens are pretty unmistakable, but perhaps somebody had found a young duck? Maybe a gosling? Or no, this would be somebody’s end-of-summer feed-barn-clearance-sale chick, some poor leftover Rhode Island rooster on gangly legs and with no down left even on top of its head, only peeping because its voice hadn’t settled yet. Probably they lived in an area not zoned for chickens, and someone had complained. Yup. Undoubtedly.
I happened to be up front when the lady carrying the very small box arrived. "I found a chick," she said hesitantly.
Good grief, did she have a sparrow in there?
“Well, you’ve come to the right place!” the receptionist said encouragingly. I leaned over the box as the lady raised the lid.
Poing. The tiny ball of brown fluff popped its head up, squinting in the light. “Peep,” it said miserably. The egg tooth on the end of its beak sparkled briefly.
“I work in the Old Town,” the woman explained, “and I was walking out to my car when I heard peeping, and there he was standing in the driveway crying his eyes out. I looked everywhere for the mother but I couldn’t find her. I can’t raise him, he’ll never make it . . . .”
She needn’t have worried. I already had the bird in my hands. The chick was uninjured but quite cold; I would have taken him in even if he’d been missing a leg. The fact that he was alive at all was something of a between-holidays miracle. At two days old, as witnessed by that egg tooth, no chick could be expected to survive longer than half an hour in the frigid, rainy weather outside. For that matter, his siblings would be in some trouble even with their mother’s care, but there was nothing I could do about them.
Fortunately, I still had some stale chick feed sitting on the shelf over my desk. We set the little squirt up in a tank with a heating pad, a rice bag, a heat lamp, and the requisite feather duster. Within half an hour the bird had recovered enough to start shouting his abandonment to the entire building. But to our surprise, once he got a good look at the people moving around the room, he settled down and began to eat. Humans, apparently, were his new flock.
Throughout the next few months, the chick grew and thrived at our house, living in a homemade brooder on top of the washing machine. I was annoyed but unsurprised when he broke with a rather snippish strain of coccidia at his third week. It was resistant to the coccidiostat in his feed and the lab never did get it properly typed, but the chick bulled his way through it without so much as a dip in appetite. One of the more unusual things about him was the fact that after that first day, he never cried. Generally a solitary chick is an extremely unhappy bird, and will peep and call incessantly. This kid chirruped and talked to himself, but not once did we hear the "peep-peep-peep-PEEP-PEEP!" of a lonely chick. In the evenings he watched as we brought in Uncle Hoppy and Auntie Sonar, who also sleep in the laundry room, and in the mornings he would watch unperturbed as they were carried outside. He was a remarkably self-possessed little fellow. We named him Quercus, Quirk for short.
Quercus sitting on his feather duster
Since then, Quercus has grown into a remarkably handsome rooster, smallish and compact with a single comb and bright orange eyes. He has orange and yellow hackles and saddle feathers, red shoulders, orange chest and belly, green legs, a black tail, and a little black striping and spangling. He crows the first three bars of "Pennsylvania 6-5000," for some reason. Having been hand-raised his entire life, he is extremely tame towards my husband and myself; matter of fact, I had had some anxiety about that, because he is so used to humans that he isn't afraid. He did indeed go through the typical young-rooster-being-a-jerk phase, but it didn't last: after a little trial and error, he learned what "Stop that!" means and, rather amazingly, he listens. He spends his days in a chicken tractor on the lawn, yelling back and forth at Uncle Hoppy and the pair of Icelandics in the side yard, and every evening comes out of his hut to be taken indoors and put to bed in the laundry room.
So, another rooster has found his way into our home, and this one a real character. I think we were both lucky.
Grumpily defending his pen from the camera
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
March and that lion
Spring, yes, spring is here. You know the old saying about how March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb? In this part of the country, March never seems to get past the thrill of being a lion. It prowls across the valley on giant puffy stormcloud paws, roars its rain against the roofs, bats houses and trees playfully with sixty-mile-an-hour gusts of wind. The only lambs around here are the ones shivering underneath their mothers' bellies, wishing they'd been born in April, which is a much nicer month all around.
Of course, we really, really do need the rain. I may grump about it--leaning against the window, peering out through the descending gray curtains, bitterly regretting that leak in my right barn boot--but we honestly need it and it is a blessing. I just wish, sometimes, that it wouldn't choose to bless us all at once.
We're on clay out here; good, thick, water-resistant stuff with a heavy leavening of iron oxides that gives it the staining power of raspberry jam. Although the ground gets pretty thirsty during the long dry heat of summer, and sucks up the winter rains like a Labrador retriever after a day on the trail, by March it's full up. During the last storm I looked out across the pasture, which is largely a natural drainage basin surrounded by higher ground, and observed water flowing out of the shallow hillside and forming a lazy, wandering stream across the lot. There must be some fairly extensive, tightly-packed layers of clay buried in that hillside. When digging the garden, we've encountered some deposits dense and fine enough to make a rustic potter dance with delight, but it sure can turn a shovel blade.
There are cows on that pasture, although they aren't our cows; the landlord and the rancher down the road came to an agreement last spring, and the result has been Natural Weed Control, Large Scale. We really did have a pretty serious weed issue before, with nearly nine acres of unused pasture rife with buried treasure: old real estate signs, fence posts, sections of log, rusty metal hardware, and in the center of the largest field, a gigantic glorious snarl-up of several hundred feet of four-strand, heavy-wire-and-carbon-fiber-post fencing that must have served some purpose in the distant past before it all fell down and the weeds grew over it. All I know is, it sure tore the stuffing out of the disker that the landlord hired to turn the weeds under two summers ago, and it would have been a grade-A leg-breaker for the cattle if we hadn't clued the ranch hands to its hidden presence. It was so buried and overgrown that human hands couldn't budge it; the men finally wrenched it free with a tractor. Currently there are about thirty cows and one bull roving around out there; they appear to be a mixture of Herefords and longhorn crosses. The calf count is up to twenty, I think. It could be higher; they're pretty squirrely.
But oh, that mud. The top end of the pasture looks like it's been used for a bombing range. The mud up there is at least eighteen inches deep. Cows, of course, will churn up the ground; they really can't help it. When the ground is saturated and there are pockets of slippery clay everywhere, several hundred pounds of animal stilting over it on four narrow sharp hooves has an effect rather like a lawn aerator. Each hoof is placed with extreme care, particularly where the ground slopes, and as the weight goes onto it it sinks well out of sight. Then, when the cow wants her hoof back, the mud doesn't want to let it go, clinging and resisting until the cow, with an aggravated snort, yanks her foot free. Schhlorppp. And again, and again, and again. These girls are going to have amazing leg muscles by summer.
The calves are another story. They skitter right over the top of it, using momentum and their lighter weight to full advantage. Lucky little devils.
The mud of the chicken yard is a lesser creature, although still worthy of respect. Chickens can do a real number on the ground too, with their enthusiastic scratching and trampling. Once they have destroyed the turf, the water just pools wherever there's a shallow depression, and those pockets can slurp a boot right off your foot if you're not careful. I've actually had less trouble with that this winter, since having a hole in one boot means detouring around anything that looks puddlish or squelchy. But it's slick as ice out there; one foot placed wrong and there's some serious laundry to do.
Currently we are enjoying a warming spell, which has me throwing windows open everywhere. The barn is getting a much-needed airing, and the pockets of damp that form on the dirt floor--oh, such a bad idea, a dirt-floored barn on a slope, but you use what you have--are reluctantly firming and drying. In another few days I'll need to check the birds' feet for the little earthen balls that tend to glue themselves to their claws as they scratch in the drying clay. In the meantime, we'll enjoy this sign of local spring: a brief respite from the tyranny of the mud. I expect there will be a few more storms as we get into April, but the cycle has turned at last.
Of course, we really, really do need the rain. I may grump about it--leaning against the window, peering out through the descending gray curtains, bitterly regretting that leak in my right barn boot--but we honestly need it and it is a blessing. I just wish, sometimes, that it wouldn't choose to bless us all at once.
We're on clay out here; good, thick, water-resistant stuff with a heavy leavening of iron oxides that gives it the staining power of raspberry jam. Although the ground gets pretty thirsty during the long dry heat of summer, and sucks up the winter rains like a Labrador retriever after a day on the trail, by March it's full up. During the last storm I looked out across the pasture, which is largely a natural drainage basin surrounded by higher ground, and observed water flowing out of the shallow hillside and forming a lazy, wandering stream across the lot. There must be some fairly extensive, tightly-packed layers of clay buried in that hillside. When digging the garden, we've encountered some deposits dense and fine enough to make a rustic potter dance with delight, but it sure can turn a shovel blade.
There are cows on that pasture, although they aren't our cows; the landlord and the rancher down the road came to an agreement last spring, and the result has been Natural Weed Control, Large Scale. We really did have a pretty serious weed issue before, with nearly nine acres of unused pasture rife with buried treasure: old real estate signs, fence posts, sections of log, rusty metal hardware, and in the center of the largest field, a gigantic glorious snarl-up of several hundred feet of four-strand, heavy-wire-and-carbon-fiber-post fencing that must have served some purpose in the distant past before it all fell down and the weeds grew over it. All I know is, it sure tore the stuffing out of the disker that the landlord hired to turn the weeds under two summers ago, and it would have been a grade-A leg-breaker for the cattle if we hadn't clued the ranch hands to its hidden presence. It was so buried and overgrown that human hands couldn't budge it; the men finally wrenched it free with a tractor. Currently there are about thirty cows and one bull roving around out there; they appear to be a mixture of Herefords and longhorn crosses. The calf count is up to twenty, I think. It could be higher; they're pretty squirrely.
But oh, that mud. The top end of the pasture looks like it's been used for a bombing range. The mud up there is at least eighteen inches deep. Cows, of course, will churn up the ground; they really can't help it. When the ground is saturated and there are pockets of slippery clay everywhere, several hundred pounds of animal stilting over it on four narrow sharp hooves has an effect rather like a lawn aerator. Each hoof is placed with extreme care, particularly where the ground slopes, and as the weight goes onto it it sinks well out of sight. Then, when the cow wants her hoof back, the mud doesn't want to let it go, clinging and resisting until the cow, with an aggravated snort, yanks her foot free. Schhlorppp. And again, and again, and again. These girls are going to have amazing leg muscles by summer.
The calves are another story. They skitter right over the top of it, using momentum and their lighter weight to full advantage. Lucky little devils.
The mud of the chicken yard is a lesser creature, although still worthy of respect. Chickens can do a real number on the ground too, with their enthusiastic scratching and trampling. Once they have destroyed the turf, the water just pools wherever there's a shallow depression, and those pockets can slurp a boot right off your foot if you're not careful. I've actually had less trouble with that this winter, since having a hole in one boot means detouring around anything that looks puddlish or squelchy. But it's slick as ice out there; one foot placed wrong and there's some serious laundry to do.
Currently we are enjoying a warming spell, which has me throwing windows open everywhere. The barn is getting a much-needed airing, and the pockets of damp that form on the dirt floor--oh, such a bad idea, a dirt-floored barn on a slope, but you use what you have--are reluctantly firming and drying. In another few days I'll need to check the birds' feet for the little earthen balls that tend to glue themselves to their claws as they scratch in the drying clay. In the meantime, we'll enjoy this sign of local spring: a brief respite from the tyranny of the mud. I expect there will be a few more storms as we get into April, but the cycle has turned at last.
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