Our friends Toni and Jessica brought their young chicken Pippi to our house today. Since they would be out of town for a couple of weeks, they needed a pet hotel while they are gone. This chick had never been with other chickens before since her siblings were killed by a predator when they were…
Yesterday we had a chance to hang out with all the chickens for quite a while, observing their individual and social behavior. The five little ones have adapted to free ranging in the yard amazingly quickly and well. They still need to dodge and avoid several hens near the bottom of the existing order, mainly…
This morning after breakfast, Naomi gave Leo a pedicure. Leo has had some foot problems that we’ve tried to alleviate by several means. His style of jumping off things (benches, the deck, stumps, our laps) with a big bouncing leap seems to make him susceptible to little cuts or punctures when he lands on something sharp….
During their first summer, we want new chicks to learn how to forage and find their way around our property, but we feel a little apprehension about how they’ll adapt. So far, this has always gone more smoothly than we imagine. We’ve found that it’s important to give them a safe indoor refuge, and the…
For the first couple weeks that the chicks spent each day in the outdoor pen, we often didn’t have much time to be with them during the day, the weather was very hot, and the chicks were too small to risk mixing with the adult hens. So we started a “family tradition” of bringing our…
[image above adapted from CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/zoonotic/gi/salmonella-poultry-poster.pdf] Today a friend who recently acquired a pet duck and a 2-3 month old hen sent us a link to a Seattle Times article (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/dont-kiss-chickens-6-sick-in-washington-with-salmonella/) about the dangers of handling poultry and contracting salmonella. The article reports 181 cases nationally, and 6 in Washington State, attributed to contact with backyard…
An outdoor pen for chicks should satisfy several goals: 1) it gives the curious, active, growing birds a chance to explore and practice free-range foraging; 2) it protects them from daytime predators such as housecats and possibly ravens, magpies, and small hawks; 3) it’s cheap, simple, and easy to move to a new location each day;…
In the hot part of the day at Smith Rock, when the sun was too bright and flat for good painting conditions, Naomi and I took a chick break near the edge of basalt cliff overlooking the Crooked River. Here’s Shantie waking from a brief nap in Naomi’s hands: Next, I happened to catch…
While Naomi was painting at the spectacular Smith Rock State Park in Oregon, I wandered off a few miles to find a spot to hang out with the chicks. I sat in the skimpy shade of two desert junipers, and the chicks explored the nearby grass, brush, and dirt. I didn’t get many decent photos,…