If you build a big house, you’ll do a big house worth of work. D&L ordered four pallets of floor tile. That’s four, or one more than three.
3000 pounds.
Per pallet.
Their big trailer won’t handle more than half that, so half is what D brought from town. We got that unloaded and neatly stacked in their house, and then the guy with the truck didn’t answer his phone and we couldn’t go get the other two.
I don’t even think the Dynamic Duo were really all that sad about that. So I was able to do that and go get my shit-shoveling done, and now I’m back to deal with chickens, and then I’m going back to D&L’s for pot pies and a chicken-coop-related strategy session.
We’re moving into a promised period of warmer weather (nearly forty today) and I must do something proactive about a bigger enclosure. One of the ladies is practically bald, and I’m really hoping more space will damp down the aggression.
Joel, At this point extra space may not fix the problem. I had a much larger coop than you do and sometimes I would get the same problem. The surefire remedy is to have the aggressive hen for dinner. Spring is coming and the hatcheries are all sending out their catalogs. Get your new and bigger coop on line and install some new birds when the time comes. Also add ground oyster shell to their feed, it’s real cheap and helps with a lot of things.
Another thing, you said you are feeding crumbles to adult birds. I think pellets, which are slightly cheaper, result in less waste. I only fed crumbles to the peeps. As soon as they started getting their adult plumage I switched them over to pellets.
we had the same problem. Maybe they need more protein. Feeding cat food worked.
Woody is right, a bully will likely to continue that way, even with more space.
take a look at what the natural grit in your enclosure consists of before you invest in oyster shell. you may have limestone grit or little calcrete nodules there already. a splash of vinegar, hydrochloric or oxalic acid will make it fiz if it is limestone, if it is dolomite, you might have to scratch it to get some fines before it will fiz, either will do the job of oyster shell.
Sulphuric acid doesn’t give a good fiz (it reacts to give gypsum, which protects the underlying stone from the acid)
Yes, Joel. The nasty one needs to be dinner. 🙁
Joel,
Chicken medicine.
As a child, I know Grandmother used a mixture of red food colour, cayenne pepper (heavy on the cayenne pepper) and fat—probably lard— to daub on the birds’ necks and bald spots. Any chicken who decided to pick at a spot of skin or blood spot would come away with a mouthful of pepper. Black pepper might work as well. I know she was going for the red colour as well as the hotness.
(This was back in the old days, when we milked our own cows, drank milk raw, and heated with wood. Ah, still do, the wood at least. 🙂 I attribute all of these practices as contributing to my remarkable health. 🙂 My primary medicines are coffee and chocolate, and those are also my indulgences, so it all works out very well.)
I hope you can save the chickens, and if not, I hope they are delicious. 🙂
**
PS, I need to add that it worked very well!!!!
**
feralfae (and Joe),
Must be the color or the fat. Strangely enough birds are pretty much insensitive to capsaicin, the stuff that makes hot peppers “hot”. Sensitivity to red pepper is actually one of the ways they define mammals. Maybe red paint would work just as well?