News of whats happening!

I am not going to post till Tuesday September 4 to catch up! I now have a Facebook Page that is going to have my chickens and what is going on with them. I will also put posts up about what is happening with the blog as well!!!! Check it out! It has the same name as the blog " The Cluck " . Hope you enjoy it!!!!!!!! :)

https://www.facebook.com/TheCluck

Preparing Your Coop for Chicks

Your chicken coop must be thoroughly cleaned and washed. The entire area must be disinfected from floor to ceiling. Leave yourself enough time for the area to dry before putting down fresh bedding. A thin layer of hydrated lime is advisable on dirt floors at this time to maintain dryness. Ensure that all feeders, drinkers and brooders have been washed and disinfected; and are all in proper working order. Check for, and seal off, all draughts, windows, doors, and do general building repairs, etc. Sealing off draughts does not mean cutting off all ventilation. A dry hen house greatly reduces the risk of coccidiosis. You may achieve this by good ventilation and stirring of litter. Do not use creosote - based products for disinfecting!

http://www.rochesterhatchery.com/pre.htm

Cute Pics!!!

Vote!!!

Hey guys I put a new poll on here!!! Don't forget to vote!!!! Thank you have a wonderful day!!!!!

Funny Pics!!

How Much and When to Feed Chickens [Part 2]

If you are unsure how much to feed your chickens (and don’t want to accidentally deprive them), fill the chickens’ feed dishes so food is available much of the day, or use feeders that hold several day’s worth of feed. You can use this feeding method for all types of chickens. It’s the way chickens would eat in nature; they eat small amounts frequently.
You can continue that method if you like, or you can feed your chickens at certain times of the day. (Most people who use this method choose morning and evening.) This allows you to control the amount of feed that may attract pests. And if the chickens are too heavy, it restricts the amount they can eat. With free-range birds, it encourages them to lay and to sleep in the coop. Usually, however, it’s just a matter of preference; some people like to observe and tend to their chickens more often than others. This method works well for all but meat birds.
Because of their heavy rate of growth, the meat-type broiler chickens need to have food available to them at all times, day and night. Remember, chickens don’t eat in the dark, so the lights must be on for these birds all night. For the Rock-Cornish crosses, the lights should be on 24 hours a day, and feed should be in the feed pans at least 23 of those hours. Some people recommend an hour of no feed, but most home chicken-keepers find that difficult to regulate. Just make sure they always have feed. Laying hens, pets, and show birds are fine with restricted times of feeding and don’t need feed at night.

Be very careful not to feed moldy food, which can kill or harm your chickens, and make sure food is stored so it won’t attract rats, coons, and other pests. If you’re using a lot more feed than you think you should, pests like rats may be eating it at night. You may want to empty feeders at night or put them inside a pest-proof container for all birds other than the broiler-type meat birds.

If you need to add grit to your chickens’ diet, you can supply it in a small dish from about the fifth day of life. Chicks should be eating their regular feed well before you add grit, or they may fill up on it. Make sure the dish is covered or narrow so the birds don’t dust-bathe in it. Discard it and add clean grit if it becomes contaminated with chicken droppings.

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-much-and-when-to-feed-chickens.html

How Much and When to Feed Chickens [Part 1]

Feeding backyard chickens is an imprecise science. It’s difficult to tell someone how much to feed their chickens, or even when to feed them. So many variables are involved: the type of chickens, whether they’re growing or laying, how active they are, how neat you are, the type of feeders you have, the number of free-loading pests you support, and the weather.
Use these guidelines for feeding your chickens, but alter them for your own flock.
Our modern, high-production egg breeds convert feed to eggs very efficiently, especially if they’re fed a ration formulated for laying hens. After they’re laying well, it takes about 4 pounds of a quality feed of 16 to 18 percent protein to produce a dozen eggs. The breeds kept for dual purposes (eggs and meat) generally have heavier body masses to support and need more feed to produce a dozen eggs than a lighter production breed.
It takes about 2 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of body weight on a growing meat-type bird. So if a broiler weighs about 6 pounds at 10 weeks, it will have eaten about 12 pounds of feed. Remember that it ate less when it was small, and the amount of feed consumed increased each week. A medium-weight laying hen will eat about 1/4 pound of feed per day when she begins producing. These are rough estimates, but they give you some idea of what to expect.

Chickens eat more in cold weather and less in hot weather.

Chicks and bunnies!!!!

How to Tell Gender Early On

Look at the chicken's feathers once it is at least a week old. Females have longer primary feathers. The covert and primary feathers of a male are typically the same length, with the covert feathers sometimes extending further.

 

Examine the chick's coloring. When a chicken has been cross-bred, the coloring should be known ahead of time. Males and females have color variations that are distinctive based upon gender. An expert can usually correctly identify chicken gender this way.

Clipping Chicken Wings (Flight Feathers)

When to Clip
If you decide it has to be done, then it’s important to wait until the bird can fly pretty well (I know, that’s why you want to clip in the first place). Brief flights develop young bird’s muscles, coordination, and balance; so it’s best to wait until a bird can fly short distances. If you want to maintain the clipped wings, then it needs to be done annually, after the bird molts and the new feathers have grown back. 
 
What to Clip
Some guides recommend clipping only one wing thereby leaving the bird unbalanced and unable to fly straight. This seems harsh to me, and I clip both wings so the chicken can’t fly but is still balanced. What you really do when “clipping the wings” is trim about a third off the tips of the primary flight feathers. To help identify the primary flight feathers, I should have taken pictures before and after trimming our rooster, but I didn’t think that far. So here is a picture of a hen with her primary flight feathers intact:



The long flight feathers on the trailing edge of the wing are what’s trimmed. You remove more length from the longer feathers at the tip of the wing and less where the wing attaches to the body, but you do trim the entire edge of feathers. Cut these to just under the next layer of feathers on the wing. This prevents the cut edges of the flight feathers from irritating the bird’s skin. The trimming can be done in stages or one cut.

How to Clip
To clip the feathers, you need a sturdy pair of scissors or sheers with rounded tips (you don’t want to accidentally puncture something). Also, I wouldn’t do this without help. You need one person to hold the chicken, while the other person extends the bird’s wing and trims. Just extend the wing out fully from the bird, and trim that first row of feathers. It’s better to take too little than too much, and you should never be cutting a feather shaft that has blood in it (it will appear pinkish). 
 
Here’s a picture of a hen with her primary flight feathers trimmed:


That’s it for clipping a chicken’s wings, your chicken is now grounded!

http://www.betterhensandgardens.com/2010/03/24/clipping-chicken-wings-flight-feathers/

Funny Pics!!!

Random Facts!!! [Part 2]

A headless chicken can run the length of a football field before dropping dead.

The longest recorded chicken flight was 13 seconds and a total distance of 301. 5 feet.

A Chicken can run about 9 miles per hour, a human can usually manage 12-15 miles per hour.

Chickens have a different alarm cluck for different predators

A chicken's heart beats 300 times a minute (about 4-5 times more than a human).

In 2007, researchers were able to extract small amounts of collagen protein from a 68 million year old Tyrannosaoures Rex leg bone. Further analysis confirmed that the chicken is the closest living relative to the T. Rex.

There are more chickens on earth than humans.

The U.S. leads the world in chicken production with 16 million metric tons in 2006. China and Brazil round out the top three producing nations.

Random Facts!!!

The average hen lays 300 eggs a year.

The record for multiple egg yolks in one egg is nine.

A chicken needs to eat approximately four pounds of feed to make a dozen eggs (about 86 cents worth of food at retail).

If a chicken has red ear lobes, it will lay brown eggs if it has white earlobes it will lay white eggs.

Chickens will lay fewer and fewer but larger and larger eggs as they grow older.

The largest recorded chicken egg weighed 12 ounces and had two yolks.

The record for egglaying belongs to a white leghorn that laid 371 eggs in 364 days.

The world record for the most eggs laid in one day is seven.

A "Cornish Game Hen" is actually a 5-6 week old chicken.

Caption this!!!!

Chickens and Kittens!!!!!!!

sweet!!!!!!

cute!!!

My Chickens First Eggs

The First Eggs out of the chickens they start out small but will get bigger!!!!!!!! :) YAY!

Whats coming up!

This week we are going to do some chicken pics!!!!!!!! School is starting back up so sorry if I post slow!!!!!!!! Have a good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bath time

I got this from the book Raising Chickens for Dummies.

Another interesting behavior of chickens is their bathing habits. They hate getting wet, but they sure do love a dust bath. Wherever there is loose soil - or even loose litter - on the floor of the coop, you will find chickens bathing.

Chickens scratch out a body-sized depression in the soil and lie in it, throwing the soil from the hole into their fluffed-out feathers and then shaking to remove it. They seem very happy when doing this, so it must feel good. In nature, this habit helps to control parasites.

In the garden or lawn, these dust-baths bowls can be quite damaging, but there is little to do about it except put up a fence. If your chickens are confined all the time , they'll really appreciate a box of sand to bath in.

Silkies in The Garden .... Part 4

This came from the magazine Backyard Poultry by Gail Damerow.

This spring, when we bought them back to the garden, the Silkies didn't take long to find their way into the blueberry patch, 95 feet from their coop. They spend most of their days scratching and dust bathing in the blueberry mulch, which posed no problem until we seeded melons and squash between the blueberry bushes. The Silkies destroyed the seedlings by covering them with mulch, so we reseeded and protected the seedlings until they were big enough to survive on their own. Our hope is that the Silkies will keep squash bugs from devastating the vines, as has happened in previous years,and to date (knock on my wooden head) we haven't seen any sign of bugs.
                                   So far the Silkies haven't made it into the main part of the garden, consisting of a series of permanent foot-tall raised beds with gravel paths between them. Even if, or when, they can't do much damage once the vegetables are established. Protected new transplants or seedlings, should that become necessary, would be a simple matter of running a low fence around the top edge of each bed. The Silkies can hop about 12 inches high, but since they don't fly, they can't get over anything higher than they can hop.
                       Today we keep four Silkies in the garden - three hens and a rooster. Even though their little coop is near the bedroom, we don't here the cock crow until we are ready to get up and let them out. Then Papa Silkie is so happy to be let out in the garden he lets the whole world know about it.

             Gail Damerow keeps Silkies in her garden in the Upper Cumberland of Tennessee. 

Silkies in the Garden... Part 3

This came from the magazine Backyard Poultry by Gail Damerow.

By  the end of summer they had ventured as far as to a small bed of Asiatic lilies, some 55 feet away, where they found the loose soil more congenial for dust bathing. Soon they were stirring up flower bulbs, which is not a serious problem for Asiatic lilies because they reproduce like weeds.
                      The forsythia and the lilies are both tall enough to make good hiding places for the little black Silkies. Unless they are cooing each other or flinging dirt over themselves you wouldnt know they were there. That is, until fall time when the forsythia lost its leaves and the lilies died back. The day we spotted a red-tailed hawk sitting on the fence above the Silkie coop we decided to move them back to the barn for the winter.

    To be continued again.........
               

Silkies in the Garden... Part 2

This came from the magazine Backyard Poultry by Gail Damerow.

Now I needed a coop to keep them in. The site of the former garden coop has long since been converted into a log-cabin tool shed. And besides, I didn't need anything that big to house a few small bantams. Something the size of a doghouse should be quite adepuate. While wandering through a local farm store we saw just such a doghouse. Retrofitting it for the bantams seemed like a simple job, so we brought it home. The The task turned out to be more involved than we had anticipated, but the result is just what we had in mind, as described in "Doghouse to Bantam Coop Conversion" on page 28.
                      By early summer the Silkies had grown enough to be moved from the barn brooder into the garden. We positioned their coop against the house, on a patch of lawn just inside the garden gate, where we can handily close it up at night, open it in the morning, and tend to the feeding, watering, and egg collecting.
                      Initially the Silkies were quite conservative, never traveling farther from their little coop than to a forsythia bush some 30 feet across the grass. Thanks to their pecking, scratching, and dust bathing I no longer have to bother weeding under and around the forsythia.

To be continued.

Silkies in the Garden... Part 1

This came from the magazine Backyard Poultry by Gail Damerow.

Many years ago when my huband and I came to our present farm we initially incorporated chickens into our garden. Eventuly we got tired of hanging roosters crow in the wee hours, and because we keep a sustainable flock (by hatching our own chicks), removing the roosters was not an option. So we moved the chickens to a distant barn.
                      Recently we have been renovating the garden and I got it into my head to keep chickens there again. But instead of moving our utility egg-and-meat flock back near the house, I wanted some just-for-fun bantams. I wanted a small breed that treads lightly on the kand and is not inclined to fly. I wanted a friendly, non-aggressive breed. I started with a long list of "my favorite bantams" and - through a long and tough process of elimination - eventually pared it down to Silkies. But which variety? In previous years I had white Silkies. Where I live now, white chickens dont stand much chance against eagles, hawks, and owls. After considering all the color options, as well as briefly contemplating the possibility of getting some each, I settled on black bearded Silkies. So Last spring I ordered a batch of chickes.

To be continued......
                 

Fun!!!!

Carrying and Holding Chickens and Chicks [Part 2]

Dont squeese birds too hard when carrying them or restraining them for treatment.  A chicken needs to move its ribs to breath well, and even if the mouth and nose are uncovered, you can suffocate a bird that is held too tightly.  A chick needs to be held loosely in your closed hand with its head peeking through your fingers.

If a bird is really wild and fighting, you can cover his head loosely with a hood or piece of soft cloth, and it will probably settle right down.  Dont try to carry too many birds at a time - take your time to do it right and humanely. beware of roosters with long spurs on their legs.  When they are struggling, these can scratch your arms and legs quite badly! Whear long sleeves to handle them.

Carrying and Holding Chickens and Chicks [Part 1]

Carring chickens by the legs with the heads hanging down is ok for birds you are taking to slaughter, but dont do it with prised layers or pet birds.  You can dislocate there legs or otherwise hurt them.  Instead, tuck the bird under one arm with your other hand hold both feet, or cradle the bird in your arms with wings under an arm.  A firm squeeze and soothing talk soon calms most birds.  The head can face forward or back, whichever works best for you.

If you need to restrain a bird for treatment and dont have anybody yo help you, you may need to tie the bird's legs together and lay it on a table, while restraining the wings with one hand or loosely wrapping the bird in a towel to restrain the wings.  Some people learn to hold the chicken with there knees while seated, with the feet up and the head facing away from them.

Fun!!!!

Polish

Polish are a very special and unique breed of chicken with their huge bouffant crest of feathers and v-shaped comb. They are tame but their behavior can be a bit wacky since their crest limits their vision. When in a flock with more aggressive breeds, Polish will tend to be on the low end of the pecking order. Egg laying is varied in this breed - some lay well and some very poorly. In short, Polish are sweet, beautiful exhibition birds and can be good layers in the backyard flock, but they're not reliable. 




(Origins/History)
Class: Continental (Northern Mediterranean)
Type: Large Fowl & Bantam
Size: Small (4-5 lbs)
Rarity: Common
Purpose: Ornamental
Recognized Varieties: Bearded: Black Crested White, White Crested Black. Bearded & non-bearded: Golden, Silver, White, Buff Laced.


(Suitability to Backyard Life)
Hardy In Winter: No
Bears Confinement: Bears confinement well
Especially Docile: Yes
Setter/Broody: No
Personality: Friendly, quiet


(Fancy Features) 
Comb Type: V-Shape Comb
Crested: Yes
Feathered Legs: No
Number of Toes: 4


(Egg Facts)
Egg Laying: Fair (2/wk)
Egg Color: White
Egg Size: Tiny (bantam) 




http://www.mypetchicken.com/chicken-breeds/breedDetails.aspx?chickenID=91&