Randy's Chicken Blog FB Page

22/11/2024

I heard from Hannah last week. She’d just lost a bantam hen, and then found my 2018 article, When Your Hen Dies. Hannah wrote, “Your blog post is lovely and has helped me during this time. Thank you.”

2017 was a bad year for me. That was the year I had open heart surgery. And my mom passed away. Bad stuff like that. On top of that, there was a whole series of deaths in my coop—eight over the course of a year. It wasn’t like a major infectious disease invaded my coop. I would lose a chicken and deal with the loss, and then before I knew it somebody else would be sick with something else—or somebody would die suddenly. It was constant heartbreak.

The final affront was the evening I went to the coop to put chickens to bed and found my little Silkie rooster pal, Snowball, dead on the coop floor. That’s when I wrote When Your Hen Dies. I think I wrote it as an exercise in self-consolation. It allowed me to work through my own feelings about chicken ownership. I originally got chickens because I thought it would be a fun hobby. And it was fun. It was beyond fun. It was spellbinding. I was so drawn in by this little society of distinct personalities living in my coop!

Then I lost one. And then more followed one-by-one. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t found that having experienced the loss of a chicken makes it any easier when I lose the next one. I mourn each death. And the sadness I feel with the latest loss in my coop is just as palpable as the sadness I felt with the first. So, needless to say, my feelings were a little raw in early 2018 when I wrote that piece. It’s pretty obvious, I think.

But if my words provide some comfort for anyone at all, then they were worth writing. I’ve heard from more people about this article than anything else I’ve written. Rebecca wrote, “No one ever warns you that you’ll fall in love with your chickens and that eventually they will and do break your heart. Thank you for this beautifully written article.” From Susan, “I lost my hen today that I hatched in an incubator exactly a year ago. We've been through lockdown together and I'm going to miss her so much. Thanks for writing this.” And this heartbreaking message from Lauren, “I lost two hens yesterday in a (most likely) hawk attack. I know that owning chickens came with risk and the occasional inevitable, but I’m DEVASTATED. You are right- they are easy to love and hard to lose. I can’t stop crying and didn’t even want to work today. Thank you for your words.”

I regularly check my blog analytics numbers to see how I'm doing. How many people are finding their way to the articles I post? What are they reading? What’s not getting read? Those numbers help me as I think about what topics I should write about next.

But analytics numbers don’t mean a fraction as much to me as the actual messages from readers like the ones that I shared here.

I love to hearing from you! You can post a comment at the end of an article, or contact me privately via the “contact me” button on my home page. I appreciate the time and effort that anyone takes to get in touch and assume that person was genuinely affected (hopefully in a positive way) by what I had to say.

After our pet chicken dies, then what? We are often loath to talk about it, because too many people just don’t get it. While nearly everybody understands the importance of our cats and dogs in our lives, to most folks, chickens are “just chickens.”

21/11/2024

Last week I heard from Tamara about the two articles I posted last year on vaulted skulls and brain damage in crested chickens. I wrote them because of Jennifer, my Polish hen. Jennifer had become brain-damaged, and her plight sent me on an information quest that resulted in those two pieces.

Tamara wrote that she had found her Polish rooster, Pancake, with blood on his crest. And after that, Pancake became lethargic and unsteady. His changed behavior sent her on an information quest and that’s when she found my articles. She wrote, “I read a few less than helpful articles before finding yours and cannot thank you enough for breaking it down so clearly. I'm not sure what to expect over the next few days, weeks, months? But I will be sending a link to your articles to everyone I know with crested birds because I imagine, like me, the majority do not have a clue how vulnerable they are…Thank you (and Jennifer) for your extremely informative articles.”

You are so welcome, Tamara, from me and from Jennifer, who, two years after her trauma, is still brain-damaged, but still with us and living the best life she can. I’m hoping for the best for Pancake and I’m glad he’s got you looking out for him.

The origin of Polish chickens and the genetics behind their crest.

20/11/2024

I visited Portugal in 2022, met a serious number of chickens and discovered lots of chicken-themed stuff. The Rooster of Barcelos, a national symbol of Portugal, is, well, a rooster! It’s hard to have anything but good feelings towards a country that holds a rooster in that level of esteem! I wrote about my experiences in Portugal in an article I posted a couple of years ago. I will go back!
When I do go back, I will definitely pay a visit to the National Tile Museum in Lisbon. Tiles are an important component of Portuguese art and decoration. If I experienced a lot of chickens in Portugal, I experienced even more tiles. They are ubiquitous – on walls, embedded into streets, in churches, homes and government buildings.
Tiles had their origin in Portugal with the 13th century Moorish conquest of Iberia. The Portuguese word for tile, “azulejo,” is from the Arabic “al zillij,” which refers to the style of mosaic tilework made from individually crafted bits of tile. Mosaics are a common form of artistic expression in Islamic art because the widespread practice of and belief in aniconism – avoiding the representation of sentient beings. When the Moors left Portugal, the tradition of tilework continued, but by the 17th century, animals and humans had found their way into the art.
Which brings me to this masterpiece on display at Lisbon’s National Tile Museum. It was discovered in a house in a Portuguese village and dates to 1665. At first glance, we see travelers passing through a village. But upon closer examination, we realize the travelers are all monkeys! This piece is a “singerie” a satirical form popular at the time where stylishly dressed monkeys replaced humans.
An even closer look at the carriage reveals that the occupant is an aristocratic looking hen! Chickens again! Aaarggghhh! This azulejo singerie is entitled “The Hen Wedding.” You think it’s on my “must see” list? Oh, yeah!

19/11/2024

Autumn is well underway! It’s time to clean up the garden, fill the woodshed, and winterize the coop! And deworm the chickens, right? Some avian vets and chicken experts maintain that you should proactively deworm your flock on a regular basis to periodically knock down the worm population and prevent a high worm load. Most recommend once or even twice a year. I’ve always followed that advice and have been routinely deworming my flock ever since I got my first chickens.

Recently, though, after some reading and research, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve discovered that there are also avian vets and chicken experts who caution against regular deworming. I’ve come to see their point. There are compelling reasons not to deworm my birds on a regular schedule. I’ve stopped. It’s a big shift for me and my flock. Here’s why I changed my mind.

Do your chickens have worms? If you keep multiple generations of chickens on the same plot of ground for a number of years, like we backyard flock-keepers do, then yes. Your chickens are probably harboring worms. What should you do?

17/11/2024

11/09/2024

I’m sure you know exactly what the expression “red in the face” means. More than likely you’ve been there. Like that time you brought that special someone home to meet your parents for the first time and then your dad monopolized the conversation with stories about dumb stuff you did as a kid. Or when you were giving that big presentation and several of your coworkers in the back were looking at you, poking each other, and laughing. And your face was so red! Because that’s the way we respond to embarrassment. And anxiety. And stress. And, well, sunburn.

The big news is that chickens get red in the face just like we do! In a study that was published in May in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, researchers filmed Sussex hens as they went about their day in a grove in France. Using image software and a specially developed computer program, the researchers then measured the level of redness in the hens’ faces in almost 20,000 individual frames and then correlated the degree of redness to the activity they were engaged in at the time the images were captured. Their faces became pinkish when they were presented with tasty treats like mealworms, but became bright red in negative encounters, like when they were being captured.

In another experiment, hens who interacted with a stranger were more flushed than hens who interacted with their usual caregiver. The paper’s authors suggests that this research could be used to develop a system to determine a chicken’s welfare.

My thoughts: First, best wishes to anyone in the world who spends any time at all thinking about the general welfare of chickens, let alone devising ways to measure it. And also, this is yet another study that demonstrates that humans and other animals are more similar than most people would like to imagine.

10/09/2024

A friend recently gave me Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship – a book that contains the mid-20th-century correspondence between E.B. White and Edmund Ware Smith, two literate, erudite men who spent half their time in the urban publishing world and the other half as gentlemen farmers in Maine. It was a fun read and I’ll have more to say about it later, but for now I’d like to focus on one of the chapters included in the book that is not related to the letters.

There’s a book called A Basic Chicken Guide for the Small Flock Owner by Roy E. Jones that was published in 1944, went through several printings, and became quite popular in the middle of the last century. For some reason, somebody decided to ask E.B. White to write the book’s introduction. It was bold to ask the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web to endorse a not-yet-published chicken how-to book. But for some reason, E.B. White agreed. Perhaps because he was enthusiastic about chickens and had his own flock and his own ideas about chicken care. Anyway, White’s introduction to Basic Chicken Guide is included in the new book.

In his introduction, White freely admits that he’s not read the book. And then he goes on to give his own philosophy and ideas regarding chicken care. They are simultaneously honest, truthful, and tongue-in-cheek. A few of them are listed below. They’re not in the order Mr. White presents them in, and are only a taste of the plethora of ideas he offers. For the full presentation, get your hands on Chickens, Gin, and Maine Friendship!

-Elevate all laying house feeders and waterers twenty-two inches off the floor.
-Never carry a strange object into the henhouse with you.
-Don’t drop shingle nails on the brooder house floor.
-Tie your shoelaces in a double knot in the morning when you get dressed, since hens are under the impression that shoelaces are worms.
-Keep Rocks if you are a nervous man, Reds if you are a quiet one.
-Don’t keep chickens if you don’t like chickens, or even if you don’t like chicken manure.
-Don’t try to convey your enthusiasm for chickens to anyone else.
-Be tidy
-Be brave
-Always count your chickens before they’re hatched.

01/09/2024

~Teeny Weeny

04/08/2024

~Spanky