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my cat is norris posted:My current big concern is that they seem to be throwing more food around than they are eating it. I've tried running the crumble through the food processor a little bit to make it smaller and maybe more palatable. I also think I need to get them a proper food trough because the chick feeder I'm currently using doesn't do much to retain tossed food...
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Jun 6, 2018 03:33
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My chooks have made friends with the mouse/rat living in the garden  They were having their midday siesta and I was watching them from my hammock. This mouse/rat just walked right through their cluster, touching most of them, and they didnt even care. Now I gotta murder their friend. 
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Jun 6, 2018 05:42
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It hears something from outside! Could it be? The siren song of death!Arglebargle III posted:I'm teaching a summer research activity to 6th graders where the assigned research question is how to raise quail in an urban setting. Any good resources that are appropriate for middle schoolers that jump out at you guys?
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Jun 6, 2018 07:33
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keeping quail legitimately taught me a lot about coping with death, all my childhood pet deaths were traumatic and i ended up completely neurotic about my animals' health but no matter how neurotic you are about quail they're still going to die, so eventually i had to learn to just deal with it
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Jun 6, 2018 08:52
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my cat is norris posted:
Is that gap wide enough for them to squeeze through? Our full sized hens could squeeze through just under a 4" gap. spookygonk fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Jun 6, 2018 |
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Jun 6, 2018 13:08
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spookygonk posted:Is that gap wide enough for them to squeeze through? Possibly! I need to go pick up some hardware cloth and arrange a greater level of security. So far, nobody's TRIED to escape, so I've been lucky! Omg I just wanna sit on the porch and listen to them burble at each other all day. 
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Jun 6, 2018 13:51
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUG6IS5FVGM edit: good lord these little buggers are cute. bantam chicks Mozi fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Jun 6, 2018 |
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Jun 6, 2018 14:14
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CURRENT MOOD: PILE
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Jun 6, 2018 22:41
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my cat is norris posted:CURRENT MOOD: PILE i can't get over how pretty they are! a rainbow flockquail vocalisations are pretty interesting. moon unit has a totally different voice when she's non-broody to the weird musical grunting she does when she's got a chick. she had a special warning sound for when felafel got too close to the baby that was this really sharp PREEE-pi-pi-pi whistle/chatter, i've never heard that noise come out of a quail before, and it seemed to be only directed at him, not predatory birds / pigeons / me / the dog (we all got the angry beeps) wait until they start crowing, it's basically my favourite noise in the world this broken hill fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 00:34
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they can do a soft crow when they know that the hen isn't far away but they're not sure where. i hear felafel do it sometimes, usually after dark. it's the same noise, but instead of  PEPREEEE it's  pepreee pretty cute tbh
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Jun 7, 2018 01:32
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Why do I see that quail looking out its window and think, "Is that animal nihilistically thinking about suicide, or is it just going, "Duuuuuuuuh" before it somehow kills itself." I love these doofuses but I'm glad I don't have to be there when the inevitable happens.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:35
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One of the smaller quailbies managed to escape last night. Fortunately, my boyfriend heard it freaking out about no longer being with its friends. We're not sure which hole in the crate it squeezed through, but hardware cloth has now become an absolute priority! I'm going shopping tonight for ENCLOSURE IMPROVEMENTS. Is it too early to flip them over and figure out genders, or should I wait a couple more weeks? I have no idea how old these guys are, tbh. I'm guessing four weeks-ish.
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Jun 7, 2018 13:18
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I used to breed Chinese king quails as pets, they were so cute, re the drowning I'd put a very shallow dish for them to drink from, went ok. The California quails were elegant but so expensive. The funnest bit was gathering Spinifex etc to give them cool tussock scape to run and play through I love the calling noise the king quails sung out when trying to find each other swee swoo swoooooo noise We had two babies escape out the aviary door once, and princess, my mum's sweet persian cat, rounded them up and sat with them like they were her kittens, until we collected them. I kept coturnix for food, they were the dumbest birds I had come across, some of them would mistake each other's toes for mealworms. I fed them a very high protein diet starter crumble, mealworms and superworms etc. I remember during slaughter how bright coloured the fat was. They were pretty magical when roasted and stuffed with dried tomato pesto and ricotta and home made stuffing Kharnifex fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 15:07
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Kharnifex posted:
In fairness, my chickens regularly mistake each others' toes for mealworms. And my toes. And my dog's toes. Toes in generally really.
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Jun 7, 2018 16:09
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Every morning I go to feed my chickens, some of the younger ones will leap vertically to attempt to RIP flesh from my fingers, because food comes from the cup, and the cup is in the fingers, and therefor by the transitive property, the fingers must be made of food!  It loving hurts, you feather brained bastards.
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Jun 7, 2018 16:45
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McGiggins posted:Every morning I go to feed my chickens, some of the younger ones will leap vertically to attempt to RIP flesh from my fingers, because food comes from the cup, and the cup is in the fingers, and therefor by the transitive property, the fingers must be made of food! That's why I put the food out before I let mine out of the coop.
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Jun 7, 2018 17:09
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Ah, mine are free roam, no shut coop at night, they set their own hours and take their own risks. They always greet me in the morning by scratching at the front door.  There aren't any foxes or snakes in the suburbs of this part of Oz, so aside from the butcherbirds they're pretty safe in my front garden.
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Jun 7, 2018 18:12
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Okay, here's the full cast! I think. There are a couple of silvers that I have a very hard time telling apart, so I'm not sure if I got individual pics of them or if I took pics of the same goober twice. The lone tuxedo:   White with black spots:   Speckled:   And now it gets tricky. Here's...a medium-brown quail:   One of the silvers, and the one that's more unique:   Darker brown:   Silver with white breast:   Lightest brown:   Okay yeah and on closer inspection I did photo the same silver quailbie twice. There's a third little silver running around who looks almost identical to the white breast shown above! my cat is norris fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Jun 13, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 22:40
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this is kind of a weird question, but why would someone who just keeps a backyard flock of chickens want 4 roosters and one hen?
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Jun 8, 2018 01:10
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my cat is norris posted:Okay, here's the full cast! I think. There are a couple of silvers that I have a very hard time telling apart, so I'm not sure if I got individual pics of them or if I took pics of the same goober twice. the silvers are gorgeous, i had a few until a goshawk managed to get into the quail cage (i got up one morning to find a bunch of decapitated corpses and one very unhappy trapped raptor), rip emmy lou and puddin*  *so called because he started pecking at crumble literally the moment he was free of the egg
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Jun 8, 2018 02:17
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 liberty valance, my arch-enemy
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Jun 8, 2018 02:25
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Maybe they just like the rooster colors and are keeping them as pets first and and dont give a drat about eggs save as a means of increasing their roostercount? I unno, that is a weird question. I went all hens for eggs.
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Jun 8, 2018 05:22
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this broken hill posted:
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Jun 8, 2018 05:31
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this broken hill posted:it's so good that you got subtly different colours so you can tell them apart. are you going to give them names, or are you too worried about getting attached? rip puddin, too eager for this world I wanna name them, I'm just waiting a few more days in case of early disasters, lol.
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Jun 8, 2018 11:39
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McGiggins posted:Maybe they just like the rooster colors and are keeping them as pets first and and dont give a drat about eggs save as a means of increasing their roostercount? My neighbors have four roosters and one hen, that’s why I was curious. They used to have just one rooster and several hens, then the demographics shifted.  I’d ask them directly but there’s a language barrier.lotta crowin’ in the neighborhood these days 
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Jun 8, 2018 15:26
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They might have taken in unwanted roosters from other people. Unless you have a sex link hybrid, there will always be people who get a bunch of chicks and end up with one or more roosters in the bunch. Sometimes people already have a rooster or are unable to keep roosters due to urban regulations, and it can be hard to find a home for them.
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Jun 8, 2018 16:40
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I figured maybe the rooster situation was just temporary but it's been about six months now. I live in a regular suburban neighborhood, not a rural area, and while I don't mind the crowing (I grew up with chickens and I kind of like it) I worry a little that some of my other neighbors might be bothered. The neighbors with the chickens have already gotten the cops called on them a couple of times for what were basically just cultural misunderstandings (they let their chickens free-range and the people with nice lawns and flowerbeds didn't appreciate it) and I'm hoping to avoid that happening to them again. They're super-nice people and good neighbors.
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Jun 8, 2018 16:54
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Jikes posted:I figured maybe the rooster situation was just temporary but it's been about six months now. I live in a regular suburban neighborhood, not a rural area, and while I don't mind the crowing (I grew up with chickens and I kind of like it) I worry a little that some of my other neighbors might be bothered. The neighbors with the chickens have already gotten the cops called on them a couple of times for what were basically just cultural misunderstandings (they let their chickens free-range and the people with nice lawns and flowerbeds didn't appreciate it) and I'm hoping to avoid that happening to them again. They're super-nice people and good neighbors. Who the hell gets angry or bothered by a chicken dicking around? If I ran into a chicken outside, I'd consider it to be a lucky day.
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Jun 8, 2018 23:19
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it was more that the chickens rooted up some planted garden beds and tore up landscaping etc. I don't landscape my yard, I like it more natural, so I enjoy the chickens. But to be fair to the unhappy neighbors, everyone's cheek by jowl on a quarter-acre lot each and I'm sure it is aggravating to plant a bed or reseed parts of the yard, just to have someone else's chickens eat the seedlings down to bare dirt when they come up. The crowing doesn't bother me either, but with four of them it's been going on from sunup to sundown every day. The chickens are technically illegal under our zoning, so I'm hoping to avoid any more police involvement for the rooster-loving neighbors. They are very cool roos. One is a big fat Barred Plymouth Rock with the sweetest temperament, when he wanders into my yard and gets chased by the dogs I've had to pick him up to chuck him back over the fence, he just clucks in a sort of confused way and he feels like a fat fluffy throw pillow. Two look like some kind of bantam game types, small with the long ruff of blonde feathers around the neck and brilliant red and green and gold colors, and the fourth is a white Leghorn. They're surprisingly chill with each other, they crow back and forth all day but there's not much fighting and generally they hang peaceably together roosting on a fence or my neighbor's work trailer, just kind of checking the world out. I enjoy having them around.
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Jun 9, 2018 01:16
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E: super wrong thread phone app! In other news, big fluffy roosters are the best! All throughout my childhood I'd grab the current farm rooster, go, "cluckcluckcluck" like an idiot, he'd grumble cluck cluck cluck in irritation and off we'd go on the farms adventures for the day. I would deffo have a roo in my yard if it weren't illegal in my area, I miss their overbearing facade of manliness and overcoming it by simply picking em up, giving them a hug and carting them round the place. McGiggins fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Jun 9, 2018 |
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Jun 9, 2018 01:42
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 can you see him??
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Jun 11, 2018 03:13
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this broken hill posted:
The tiny friend 
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Jun 11, 2018 09:47
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CROWS EVERYWHERE posted:The tiny friend   they're so tiny. the hen (her name is yentl) was advertised with a close-up photo with nothing in it to show scale so i assumed she was a young coturnix, you can imagine how surprised i was when she was only about the size of a pea. next time i'll look for the bright orange legs. as you can see i've had to net the whole cage to stop them from getting out, they're like mice, they can squeeze through any gap (i had another hen but she made it between the bars, ascended to heaven and was last seen flying clean over three houses into the reserve at the end of the street) i won't spam the thread with photos, coturnix kind of blur the line between "chicken" and "not a chicken" but these guys are definitely not chickens lol. still i love them, they're slowly getting used to me enough that i can sit outside the cage and watch them without them freaking the gently caress out as long as i don't make eye contact or any sudden movements
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Jun 11, 2018 11:07
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why are they so small why
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Jun 11, 2018 11:47
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quite stretched out posted:why are they so small
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Jun 11, 2018 11:51
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Your not-chickens are welcome in this thread, friend. Aussie quail are amazing, every time I have ever been thrown from a horse it has been due to a quail swarm exploding out from the ground around the horses feet and thus triggering the horse to tweak out a bit. What specific breed are those ones, if you know? McGiggins fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Jun 11, 2018 |
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Jun 11, 2018 12:07
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they're usually called king quail or button quail, they're a common aviary bird all over the world (good for running around the bottom of cages pecking up seed, it limits mouse infestations) so mine are basically a different species to the ones in the wild, which are apparently found all through australasia and southeast asia. but they look the same. the intricate little beard on the rooster is found in the wild birds and it is just the most delightful thing i've ever seen in my life
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Jun 11, 2018 12:42
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they're rare in the wild, though. the ones that almost slayed your horse were probably stubble quail or brown quail (they both hang out in grasslands in eastern australia, if that describes your area), which are a species of coturnix like the japanese quail (moon unit and felafel), so closely related but much wilder and smarter. these little guys are undergrowth specialists and unfortunately undergrowth is getting harder and harder to find, they also need regular water and that's also getting harder and harder to find, so if you did see them in the wild they'd be in the rainforests
this broken hill fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Jun 11, 2018 |
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Jun 11, 2018 13:00
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i'm planning to keep a colony of stubble and/or brown quail eventually, but i'll need an actual run for them and for that i'll need to not be in a rental property so lol welp
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Jun 11, 2018 13:02
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I had a chick question, I'm raising nine chicks right now and they're all doing great except for one, who is about 2/3 the size of the others and has had pasty butt issues; its vent is protruding a bit and it keeps messing itself and I have to clean it off once or twice a day or it starts to block it. Hasn't quite been a week yet. The chick is eating and drinking normally otherwise but definitely isn't acting quite as sharp or energetic as the other chicks. I'm wondering if this will all just clear up with time or if there could be an underlying sickness or something.
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Jun 11, 2018 13:06
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