ChickenCam

Chicken + Beer Can = Beer Can Chicken

Chicken Keeper — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 15:36:45 +0000

Take a beer can, drink half the contents, stuff the can (and its remaining contents) in the body cavity of a whole chicken and grill.
Outstanding!

» How to make Beer Can Chicken (via Ask.com)

Eggs come from where?

Chicken Keeper — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:49:55 +0000

I can always tell when people are way too disconnected from reality. Last week we had a couple of friends from the city over for dinner and I took them on a small tour of the property, including a trip through the chicken & duck yard. Here is the actual conversation:

Friend: What are all the chickens for? Do you eat them?

Me: No, we have them mostly for the eggs.

Friend: You get eggs from chickens?

Me: Uh, yeah… where did you think they came from?

Friend: I dunno, the store?

Upon departure, I gave him and his wife a dozen fresh eggs to take home even though I’m pretty sure he’s afraid to eat them. You know they do come from “real, live” chickens…

What’s hatching on the Chicken Cam?

Chicken Keeper — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:14:58 +0000

Well, nothing is hatching just yet. But I did notice a couple of our ducks are now sitting on nests. Every year we get a couple of new members of out “feathered” family.

Here’s a photo of last year’s additions. The two yellow ones grew up to be gray just like mother duck. If you watch the Chicken Cam often enough, no doubt you’ll see the black one as well — she’s pretty hard to miss.

Best Poultry Book I Own

Chicken Keeper — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:23:32 +0000

Over the years I’ve had a number of friends and acquaintances ask me how it is I learned so much about raising poultry. (I grew up in the suburbs of Orange County, Calif. where the closest thing we ever saw to a real chicken was on TV.) The truth is, there isn’t that much to raising chickens, ducks, etc. You provide them a safe area, food and water, and they pretty much take care of themselves. Of course, you don’t know this when you’re first starting out, so it’s nice to have some sort of guide.

When I got my first batch of chicks from the feed store 15-odd years ago, I also picked up a copy of Raising Poultry The Modern Way by Leonard S. Mercia. The book is designed for those interested in raising small flocks (backyard, free range or otherwise) of chickens, ducks, turkeys and geese both for egg and meat production. It’s a comprehensive book that takes you through everything step-by-step beginning with building proper housing, selecting your breeds, brooding and rearing all the way through egg production, slaughter and meat preparation (if that’s your intent).

Chapters are well laid out, and the specific needs of each type of poultry such as food supplements, disease prevention, etc., are all throughly discussed. There’s also plenty of illustrations and diagrams — making it very easy to thumb through and get a visual answer to your question.

My copy of the book is the ninth edition, released in 1992, which seems to be the last update (how much has poultry changed in 15 years anyway? It’s not like they’re Internet-enabled now or something). It’s still an excellent guide, and I find myself referring to it even to this very day. So if you’re looking for one book to tell you most everything you need to know, this is the one.

You can pick up copy of Raising Poultry The Modern Way at most any feed store that carries Storey Publishing’s books, as well as most online bookstores. I’ve include a link to the book on Amazon.com below, as well as the publication details in case you’d like to order it from your local feed store or bookseller.

Raising Poultry the Modern Way (on Amazon.com)

Book Details:

Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC; Revsd/Updt edition (January 4, 1990)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0882665774
ISBN-13: 978-0882665771

Make Chicks With Your Bare Feet

Chicken Keeper — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:18:15 +0000

The following is supposed to be an activity for 4 to 8 year-olds, but I think with the right attitude (and perhaps an adult beverage or two) grownups could have fun with this too.

What you need:

Yellow paint
Wash tub/bucket big enough for your foot
Construction paper
Colored Pens / Pencils

What you do:

Get some construction paper and put it on the floor
Dip your (bare) foot in the yellow paint and step on the construction paper to make a footprint.
The heel is the chick’s “head”
Let the paint dry and draw in a beak, legs, etc. to make the footprint look like a baby chicken.
Pin the finished work to your wall, bulletin board, refrigerator, etc. to show your kids that you’re at least as creative as they are.

The original “kiddie” instructions come via KinderArt.com

Chicken Scented Soap Bubbles

Chicken Keeper — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:00:19 +0000

You can now add soap bubbles to the growing list of things that “smell like chicken”.

According to gadgetshop, who is selling the “Fetch a Bubble Machine“:

Adapted from one of their existing products, the team at Gazillion saw the need for an automatic scented bubble blowing machine after watching a TV series on Dog behaviour, in which the K9’s under observation went utterly bananas for bubbles! The Fetch a Bubble was designed as an Ideal toy for indoor or outdoor use, and is incredibly simple to set underway. It’s series of bubble wands rotate through 13 full revolutions in one minute firing off a frenzy of thousands of bubbles per minute in a Tommy-Gun like fashion!

As to why they chose to scent the bubbles with chicken smell, I have no idea — especially give the wide range of stinky things dogs would rather lick. But I’m guessing that the “another dog’s butt” smell wasn’t available at the time.

Product Link.

(Thanks once again to Trixie over at Thirty Two Flavors for the link.)

Good day to be a duck

Chicken Keeper — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:15:38 +0000

It’s pouring rain here and has been on and off for several days. Naturally, these are ideal conditions if you’re a duck

since it means lots of mud and goo in which to shovel your bill looking for grubs, worms and the like.

I can tell when it’s raining in the morning even without looking outside because the chicken/duck coop sits about 50 feet away from our back window. If it’s a normal dry morning the chickens will be shuffling around making their usual clucking and scratching noises.

But if it’s raining, I’ll hear webbed-feet dancing in the muddy areas of the coop accompanied by lots of impatient quacking. It’s as if the ducks are saying “hurry up and let us out! There’s mud out there!”

The chickens on the other hand will remain in the coop where it’s nice and dry. (There’s nothing sadder looking than a wet hen.)

Duck’s Feet (with Chicken attached)

Chicken Keeper — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:34:16 +0000

Around here the ducks and chicken’s mingle freely, but not that freely. However, down in Colombia it seems to be a different story because one guy has a chicken with a duck’s feet. (Which raises the question “is a there a duck with chicken feet somewhere nearby?”)

Link to story (with video goodness).

Crouching Tiger, Attacking Chicken

Chicken Keeper — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:03:51 +0000

Before you decide get all Bruce Lee on a chicken, make sure the chicken hasn’t been working on it’s black belt with Mr. Miyagi. Otherwise you’ll end up like this kid:

Karate Kid vs. Chicken

Via Shakespeare’s Sister (Thanks to Trix at Thirty Two Flavors)

Le Palais de Poulet

Chicken Keeper — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:43:44 +0000

I built my first chicken coop out of some old hollow-core closet doors back in 1990. Never having built a coop, I thought it was pretty good. Small and squat (basically 4 x 4 x 4 feet), it had a shed roof and a lifting top that allowed me to pop it open and grab the eggs out of the nesting box.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that a little coop with just one opening might be cozy in our mild Southern California winters, but in the summer it turned into a smelly, hot, airless box (think “The Box” from Cool Hand Luke). Not surprisingly, the chickens would have nothing to do with it at those times and would lay eggs in the bushes and roost in the trees at night.

Of course, chickens being completely clueless animals at night, they were easy pickings for nocturnal tree climbers like Opossums and Raccoons and I lost all four chickens in the span of a few nights.

So I tore down the first chicken coop and set about building what my wife termed “Le Palais de Poulet”, or “The Chicken Palace”.

Not The Chicken Palace, but close

This time I built a full-sized coup 100 feet deep, 8 feet wide and tall, complete with a front door, windows and ventilation better than my own house. I also built a series of luxury nesting boxes (private bath, cable TV - the works), and two levels of roosting area. In front of the coop I also built an enclosed entry “courtyard” that kept out the varmits and made everything safe and secure in the evenings.

Over time jasmine and climbing roses have grown over the courtyard enclosure and most people have a hard time believing that it’s actually a chicken coop and not a bungalow. The ducks obviously figured the chickens were getting a better deal and eventually abandoned their own place and moved in with the chickens. Now the chickens spend their evenings “upstairs” in the roosting areas and the ducks “downstairs” in comfort under the nesting boxes.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos of the coop at this time because the entire thing is obscured by trees and vines. But in the next few weeks I’ll be doing some pruning for spring and I should be able to get some nice pictures then.

Until then, enjoy this description and photos of the chicken coop built by the folks at Rurality.