Hey, look! It’s connected again! Funny story time.
I’m always looking for edibles I can scrounge to keep the chicken feed costs down. I’ve tried the bald ladies on every sort of grass that grew during this very fecund Monsoon. I’ll collect from neighbors willing to save me their veggy scraps. When a recipe calls for half a can of peas, the remainder does not go to waste.
And the ladies will definitely not turn their beaks up at a bit of mouse tartar. I’ve seen them squabbling over the tattered remains of a field mouse that got caught stealing from their pellet feeder. The poor little thing was quite past a 911 call.
So yesterday I got a call from my neighbor J, who had given me a whole bunch of fiberglass insulation last winter. I put it up in Landlady’s barn, which did not really endear me to Landlady. Now J wanted some of it back, and I didn’t figure Landlady would mind. We brought the Jeep trailer to the barn and loaded it up, in the process terminally disturbing a deermouse nest. When we pulled out the batts the floor of the trailer was littered with naked, shivering little pinkies.
Mama Deermouse froze until clearly spotted. Then she grabbed the nearest baby in her mouth and made a break for it. Neighbor J has a real thing about mice in his buildings and went completely kill-crazy, chasing the little thing all the way across the yard until she found refuge under a horse trailer. Running like a madman, he never did catch her. And she never did let go of that baby.
I laughed and cheered her on through the whole incident, which J didn’t find at all funny. Then I found a little box, picked up all the pinkies in the trailer, and brought them home to my chickens. They barely hit the ground; the bald ladies knew exactly what they were for.
Oh yes, chickens love to eat mice. We had a big pole barn full of hay, and the mice were terrible sometimes. The barn cats got their share, for sure, but each week we turned the chickens loose in there and tipped the bales one by one. Lots of mice would run out, and the cats got most of those. The chickens rushed in and snatched up any “pinkies” in nests under those bales. And a great time was had by everyone. 🙂
The reason for all the bale turning was that the dairy goats would not eat hay that mice had nested in. They would nearly starve first… and that doesn’t produce any milk. Any hay that did get mouse piss polluted went to the cows… who could not have cared less. The horses were somewhere in between. Some would eat it, and some would not.
We feed them the remains of fish in Philippines. Gut, heads, tails. These things used to be 6 feet tall and would have eaten …us… if we had occupied the same address on the timeline as they did then.
I have seen our chickes kill and eat:
lizards
snakes
mice
and even an unfortunate MOLE that poked his head up out of the ground on the wrong side of the chicken run fencing.
It’s most amusing to see them running around the yard chasing the flying bugs…
When I was a kid we would let the chickens into the garden a few days a week. Nothing sounds like the ruckus a few hens fighting over a tomato worm would raise. You would think they had the winning lotto ticket the way they fought.
Roger