So today I decided I would try to trim my Gold Laced Wyandotte's toenails. I decided to use her for my first attempt at this job because she is my quietest hen when it comes to handling, and because I happened to catch her more easily than any of the others...
A word of caution to anyone who is going to attempt to trim a chicken's nails. Don't!
No, seriously, what I mean is, don't undertake this lightly if you've never done it before. There is some basic equipment you should have on hand before you start and which I foolishly neglected to have and this is my cautionary tale.
So, before you even think of touching a sharp pair of nail trimmers to a chicken's claw, please gather the following.
Sharp Nail Clippers
Cotton swabs
Kwik Stop powder or Corn Flour
A prepared isolation pen
Bandages
A stiff drink! (medicinal)
The reason for the Kwik Stop powder and corn flour is to stop any bleeding should you do what I did, and take off too much of the nail.
I really only nipped off the very tip of the claw, but obviously nicked the quick and this bled. It bled a LOT. This photo was taken after I had been applying pressure on the end of the nail for about 10 minutes and it was only just beginning to clot.
I don't have any Kwik Stop powder, so we had to resort to using corn flour which will help to stop bleeding from this kind of injury, but it doesn't work as well.
We buried the injured toe in corn flour and it stuck to the injured nail quite nicely.
The poor victim was then put into isolation where she will stay for 24 hours to ensure she doesn't reopen the wound by scratching in the dirt.
I will try clipping nails again, but will be much more cautious next time and make sure I am fully prepared, including having Kwik Stop powder on hand for emergencies!
I mentioned in my previous post that our Good Friday this Easter break was accompanied by its own set of challenges. Well, now I have gotten past the worst of it, I can post about what happened.
On Friday morning, I went up to the coops to let my chickens out, and to fetch my Australorp pullet so that I could get off to an early start with her training for the show bench. I went into the coop and did my usual head count, and short period of observation of the hens which I do every morning in order to ensure everyone is present and in good health.
Right away, I noticed that something was 'off' about the Australorp. She stood off in a corner, alone and had the dreaded 'downward tail and ruffled appearance' of an unwell chicken. I let the other hens out to forage, released the rooster from his nightbox and then picked up the pullet, who submitted, unresisting to being handled (another red flag) and carried her down to the patio where her training pen was set up.
I set her on the table where her pen was, and commenced to gently examine her, prodding and feeling all over for any sign of injury or disease. My heart sank at the discovery I made.
I will be placing the rest of this post behind a cut as some of the photographs are somewhat graphic.
Well, it has been more than a week since I posted about the rooster
box that we set up for my beautiful big Australorp Cockerel, ChopChop.
He's getting used to the routine of being put into his box each evening,
and let out again in the morning. As far as crowing goes, I only hear
him if I happen to be awake, so that means I have not heard him crowing
before 8am since we put him into his box. He does crow while he is in
there, but the sound is somewhat muffled. I have not heard from the
neighbours about whether he is still waking them at 2am, so if I don't
hear from them in the next few days, I will pay a visit and ask if all
is well now. I'm hoping we've solved the problem.
Last Wednesday, I
went broody and set 8 eggs to incubate in the el cheapo incubator I
bought last year. I candled them at day 3 but the results were pretty
inconclusive. I'm hoping that perhaps Boomer managed to fertilise some
of the eggs before we sold him, and decided to set some to see if that's
the case. It costs next to nothing to run the incubator and the eggs
are a lot less precious and expensive than the previous batch I hatched.
I'll keep the blog up to date. I think I might have just a couple that
are viable. I will candle them again at day 7 and see how it looks.
Yesterday,
I realised with horror that I have not wormed my flock since August
last year! This could explain the unthriftiness in a couple of the birds
and since the youngsters are now 6 months old, I decided I needed to
get onto that asap. I gave the most unthrifty of the hens a dose of
Moxidectin immediately, and this morning I put Piperazine into the
drinking water for the rest of the flock, and wormed ChopChop with a
couple of wormout pills. I am usually very careful to adhere to a three
monthly worming system, but for some reason, time has slipped by while I
was not paying attention. I will need to redo the whole flock in a
fortnight to make sure that I have killed off all the possible worm
burden from the birds.
We are once more up to our ankles in mud
and water in the back yard, with three solid days of rain that has
barely let up. I've given up trying to keep the chickens in out of the
wet and have been letting them out to forage in the rain. They seem to
have enough sense to get under cover if it really pelts down, and they
spend a lot of time under the denser foliage of the mulberry trees when
it's only light rain. They're getting a bit wet, but I have been locking
them up early and feeding them oats to help them warm up so they are
dry by the time they go up on the roost for the night.
There's not
a lot going on other than these things. Life at Hensington Palace ticks
by and everyone is relaxed and happy. After the 'interesting times' we
had for the past few weeks, this is quite a refreshing break!
As
you can see from the image, this shell is very thin and brittle. I was
able to make an indent in it by gently pressing my thumb against it. If
I'd pressed any harder, the shell would have ruptured.
It has been an interesting and exciting week at Hensington Palace.
First the good news. Our little purebred Australorp pullet laid her
first egg on Friday morning! I was so happy and proud to see it. I've
raised this little girl from egg to egg layer and was so pleased to find
her little gift under the roosting perch. She has laid each day since
then, one smallish, perfectly formed brown shelled egg each day like
clockwork.
In
other, not so great news, our problem crossbred layer hen is having
laying issues once again. She had been doing so well, and I was
beginning to hope that all her troubles were behind her. For those who
haven't been longtime followers of this blog, I will recap.
We got
this hen as one of our two original laying hens back in 2011 as a gift
for mother's day from my children. Neither of them was laying yet when
they first arrived. They were little, cute POL hens and we eagerly
awaited our first eggs from them.
It seemed to take forever for them to finally lay, because we got them in winter and they didn't start laying until the spring.
Anyway,
eventually they did both start to lay, but before too long, "Bossie" as
we had named the black hen, began to have trouble. It started off with a
nasty prolapse. I was horrified the morning I went to the coop and
found the poor girl with her bottom all red, and seemingly turned inside
out. I put her in isolation and sent out an urgent message to a chook
owning friend, asking what I ought to do. I was told that if the
situation didn't revert by itself, the alternatives were vet treatment,
or culling. My heart was heavy. I didn't want to have to destroy my
lovely little hen so soon after getting her! Fortunately, with a little
time alone to rest and be quiet, the prolapse reverted of its own
accord. Bossie had one more prolapse after that, a few days later, but it was less severe and reverted as soon as I picked her up.
She
seemed well after that, but a couple of months later, I started to find
broken eggs in the nesting box each morning. At first, I thought the
hens must have developed a habit of egg eating. (A big no no in laying
coops!) but then I realised that these eggs had very thin, brittle
shells. Again, it was Bossie that produced these flimsy shells.
The
advice for this situation was to insure that the hens were getting
enough shell grit (for calcium) and sunshine (vitamin D) both of which
they were getting plenty of, being free range hens, and also having a
dish of shell grit available free choice in the coop.
Another
piece of advice was to try and get boss to stop laying, to give her
system a break and reset everything. I tried everything I could, but
Bossie is a commercial hybrid and is programmed to lay, lay, lay... She
did not go off lay even for one day, despite my best efforts. She did,
however start laying hard shelled eggs again and I finally thought her
troubles were behind her.
Alas, this morning, I found another soft
shelled egg under the roost. She usually always lays in the nest, so I
think this egg may have 'slipped' out while she was sleeping last night.
That is the
biggest problem with such eggs. The shell of an egg is subjected to a
lot of pressure as it passes through a hen's body to emerge from the
cloacca.
Should the shell break before the hen is able to pass the
egg, this will lead to a painful and fatal infection called Egg-Yolk
Peritonitis. It is dangerous for a hen to be afflicted by soft shell
problems as she can get into dire straits!
My decision now, is
whether I try to fix this, whilst running the very real risk that she
will wind up with peritonitis, or do I write her off as high risk and
cull her. It's not an easy decision to make, but I need to consider the
hen's welfare as well as my own feelings about this. I already think
I've made the decision.
I have to say that my life has taken on some unusal practices since
getting chickens. With the current wet weather, I have been adding new
and unusual activities to my repertoire more often.
Last week, I
set up a meal worm breeding box to have a ready source of good quality
protein available for the chooks as a treat, and also for when I have a
sick chicken whose appetite needs tempting. The worms have been happily
breeding away in their box since I put them in there, and I've been
giving them a diet of raw carrot, stale bread and the occasional piece
of sweet potato. I'm surprised how easy it is to breed them. I just
tossed them into a box of bran and left them to it, really. They're
doing the rest!
Anyway, upon going to check on the worms this
morning, I found that the nest was under serious attack from invading
forces. ANTS!!
The little blighters were swarming through the box,
running off with bits of bran, shed meal worm skins and a team of them
was even carrying off one of the worms! This, I could not have. Sandra
and I spent about 45 minutes sifting the bran meal and picking out the
worms to transfer them into an ant-free container while the curious, and
ever hopeful chickens cooed and clucked around us, looking for a
handout. We got all of the ants out of the bran and replaced the worms
in their box sans ants and then I turned my attention to one of the hens
that was hanging about.
Worms in our rescued meal worm farm
We
bought two new Bond Brown POL hens a few weeks ago, and when we got
them home, noticed that the poor little things had had their beaks
trimmed rather messily. Beak trimming and debeaking is a practice I
don't hold with, but it is done with chicks which are likely to be sold
into battery farming systems so these girls had probably been done by
the farm that bred them prior to being sold to our local feed barn.
Anyway both of them have uneven beaks as a result of this, and the
bottom beaks tend to grow out past the top beak, which looks odd and
probably makes eating a bit of a challenge. I filed back the beak on one
of the girls a few days ago, so I had no qualms in grabbing this one
(after a merry chase!) and applying my emery board to her beak too.
This hen has had her beak trimmed
The
hen in the picture above is not mine, but is an example of a hen
with the top beak trimmed back as my hens' have been. Again, this is
not something I would have chosen to have done to my chickens, but it is
done for battery hens to prevent them from pecking each other to death
in the laying pens. It only took a few minutes with the emery board to
file her beak back so it matched the length of the top one. The entire
operation was watched carefully by a nervously pacing rooster who
demanded to know what I was doing to his favourite hen!
Her 'beakicure' all done, I released Rhonda who scampered off up the yard to join her flockmates, none the worse for wear.
Next
adventure--Nail trimming! *ulp* That one really makes me nervous. I've
never done it before so it will be an entirely new experience for me and
the chooks!
I have just added a new page to the site called Chicken Medicine Cabinet. On it I will/have list/ed some of the remedies I use in caring for my chickens. There are also recipes for special diets to feed to sick chickens. Where the information is not mine, I have tried to refer to the websites I have gleaned it from with links included to the original source.
Please be aware that these are just some things I have tried over time with varying success rates. You should not presume that these remedies are a replacement for the expert opinion of a qualified vet or specialist. I am not a vet, nor do I have any training in animal medicine. Please take these hints and tips in the spirit they are offered in, and consult a veterinarian if your animal does not improve within a reasonable timeframe.
You can view the page by clicking on the tab above.
I've had a Light Sussex hen in the Hensington Hospital for a few days here. She is one of the 'guest hens' that is staying with us while her family are overseas for the Christmas Holidays and the poor thing has caught a cold. (Colds/respiratory infections) are fairly common amongst chicken flocks and this is nothing serious. However, because she has been a little bit off colour, she has also become the victim of some bullying from her coopmates. She wound up with an injury to her head near her comb which was quite inflamed and sore so I decided to separate her out from the flock and put her into sickbay.
Photo showing (black, crusty) nasal discharge and the sore, red area next to her comb where another hen has pecked her.
Closeup of peck injury near comb on the lefthand side of the hen's head. Swollen, sore and hot to the touch.
I isolated her, and put some avian multi-vitamins in her drinking water and then cleaned the injury with diluted hydrogen peroxide in water. I also used a Q Tip to clean some of the gunk out of her nostrils and then applied Savlon cream to the injured place on her head.
Today, the hen seems a little brighter and she laid an egg this morning which is generally a good sign. Her appetite is still good and she seems to enjoy the taste of the water with vitamins added. I will clean her wound again this afternoon, and see how she goes over the next few days. She is still coughing, so not completely out of the woods, yet. I am confident she will make a full recovery though.
Photo taken this afternoon showing reduction of swelling around the peck injury and cleaner nostrils.
Yesterday while I was drinking my morning coffee, I could hear a faint sound which I couldn't quite decipher coming from the direction of my chicken coops. I couldn't decide, sitting in my study, if it was a hen announcing the arrival of an egg, or some other strange commotion. I decided to get up and go to the back patio to listen more closely.
I didn't actually make it out to the patio, but froze, listening just inside the back door with a big, sloppy stupid grin on my face. Yes one of our young cockerels has come of age, and was letting the world...well, the backyard at least know about it with a soft, rusty sounding "Err-uh-errrrrrr!"
I don't know which one of the boys it was. When I went up to the grower pen to ask who was crowing, I was met with sealed beaks and innocent looks while the young pullet softly suggested a solution to the 'problem.'
"Chop-chop!" she clucked under her breath. "Chop-chop-chop!" She is always suggesting that her brothers should get the chop! She's such a meanie.
All of the other hens, both my own, and the guest hens we are chook-sitting were in a state of high excitement, calling out to let the 'man' know where they are.
So, our 'babies' are all grown up. 12 weeks old, today and I am already starting to plan for next season's hatch. I love the rhythm that these lovely birds have brought to my life. Yes, they're hard work, but they repay my efforts in eggs, and more than repay it with the enrichment they bring me.
I've got two commercial laying hens in my flock. Rosie who is an ISA Brown and Boss, who is a black Ausrtralorp Utility. They were my original two hens, and when I got them, they were bought simply for the purpose of laying eggs and not really for any other reason. Commercial laying hens are excellent for anyone who is just wanting a few hens to provide eggs for the kitchen since they are bred to lay every day, and to never, or very rarely go broody, they are very good in those types of scenarios.
That being said, however, commercial chickens do have their own set of issues that comes along with their steady egg production. When commercial hens were first developed, they were intended for intensive farming in battery housing where they would live in temperature controlled environments with artificial lighting in order to encourage them to lay and lay and lay some more. Under those conditions, they're expected to last about 18 months and their breeding can tend to predispose them to reproductive issues.
That is what I am confronted with right now with my black utility Australorp.
About a week ago, our weather patterns took a sharp turn into hot, dry weather and on that first day, all of my chickens got quite stressed with the heat. Boss, my Australorp was also struck with a mild case of sour crop that day, which I managed to alleviate successfully, but she has not been completely 'right' since then. She's been off her food a bit, and also quite sluggish and just not herself.
For a few days, she didn't lay at all, and then she produced an egg which had a very thin shell.
Very thin shelled egg
That egg got broken by my lovely big Sussex Hen when it was her turn on the nest, and she enjoyed a little snack on the contents while she laid that day. Not her fault. There is no hen on earth who won't devour an egg that gets broken in the nest or coop, especially if it lands right in her lap, so to speak.
So for a few days after that, Boss didn't lay at all, and then she laid a normal egg. I crossed my fingers, hoping that her problems had been due to heat stress and she might have gotten over it.
Not so. Unfortunately she has been sporadic with laying since then, and then three days ago, I discovered what resembled a puddle of eggwhite in the nest with the other hens' eggs. That has been the case every day since and today, I also found the following.
Soft Shelled Egg
This is what is commonly referred to as a soft shelled egg. It's not really even a shell, seems more like just the membrane without the protective hard calcified shell around the outside to keep the egg intact. It is a very dangerous situation for a hen to be laying soft eggs like this. It is quite possible that she will wind up rupturing an egg inside her body which can cause a condition known as Egg Yolk Peritonitis. Pretty much a death sentence for her if that should happen.
Other than this egg laying problem, the hen seems fit and healthy and I am reluctant to give up on her at this stage. I have isolated her from the flock in a small pen in our garage. This is so that she will be kept in darkness 24 hours a day and hopefully will go off the lay.
By also changing her feeding routine and switching her to a different ration, I am hoping to put her into a forced moult which will mean she stops laying for some time. This should rest her system, and hopefully lead to recovery, but it is all a bit of a gamble really. Given her breeding, she might just be at the end of her productive days and I will need to make the decision whether to put her down or not.
Personally, I will not have anymore commercial layers after my current two are gone. I plan to breed Australorps anyway, and pure breeds have fewer problems with their reproductive systems due to the fact that they don't lay as many eggs.
I am hoping this poor little girl will come good, but it is a forlorn hope.
Have you ever had one of those days when from the moment you got up in the morning, until the sun went down in the afternoon you just felt like you did nothing but run around doing a whole bunch of things but not accomplishing a whole lot?
That was Friday at Hensington Palace! We've been having some quite warm weather here the past couple of days and this has meant that the chickens were all becoming a little bit heat stressed. Thursday, the mercury climbed to 32c and today, it was about 31c I think. We were caught very much unprepared as the average mean temperature in our area, even in the hight of Summer is around 30c which is still warm, but not the kind of baking heat we had the last two days! The chickens were quite stressed on Thursday and there was not much that I was able to do for them as I was at home alone, and I have disabilities which make it difficult for me to climb or lift things. All I could do was let the chickens out on free range and make sure they found some shade.
For the chicks, I had to make sure they had plenty of water and that they didn't get frightened or upset during the hottest part of the day. Thankfully, they all survived, but I knew that something would need to be done on Friday to keep them a bit cooler.
I posted in the forum asking for some advice on what to do to avoid heat stress and got some wonderful suggestions. Some, I couldn't implement, but others, such as providing the chickens with ice so they would have cool water, I could do, as well as placing shade cloth over their coops to keep the sun off the metal roofing.
Sandra and I got some lengths of shadecloth out of the storage sheds and draped these over the coops and the chick's growing pen. We weighted them with bricks for now, but will need to find a more permanent way to affix them before we get any major summer storms.
I had frozen some water in plastic tubs over night, and we also filled a couple of buckets with water and placed them around near the chooks' favourite shady spots in the yard. The chooks liked the idea of the water buckets, but having never seen ice before, were a little nonplussed about what to do with it! That problem was quickly solved though, when Sandra sprinkled a handful of their feed into the container with the ice. They soon got the idea that pecking the ice would either reward them with food, or with something cold and refreshing and they decided to camp next to the ice bucket for the afternoon!
Chooks introduced to ice for the first time
The next order of business was to deal with the chicks who were feeling the heat again in their aviary. We dug around in the handy dandy storage shed and came up with an old cage that used to house my pet fancy rats in the yea long ago! I had been intending to toss it out when the council had a hard rubbish collection a while back, but fortunately, there it was in the dim, dark recesses of the shed, cobwebbed and forgotten, awaiting just such an emergency as this!
The cage was promptly hauled out into the light of day, dusted off and recieved a couple of small modifications in order to become a shady, if somewhat small enclosure for the chicks who decided that cramped or not, it was wonderfully cool and being on bare ground, was the perfect place to settle in for a luxurious dust bath in the cool, damp earth under the tree!
Dustbathing Chicks
(I needed to refresh their water bowl four times that day due to them kicking dirt into it!)
Well, by this time, with all the mad activity to try and prevent our chooks from getting heat stroke, Sandra and I almost had heat stroke ourselves! It was time to retire indoors for a cool drink, and some study before having our lunch.
The big chooks hung out most of the afternoon under a shady tree, camped next to their ice block and bucket of water, whilst the chicks dust bathed, scratched in the grass and squabbled over bugs in their makeshift enclosure.
While the chooks were all kept busy with their outdoor pursuits, I decided it was time to tackle the tomatoes I had picked on Thursday.
I got to work and transformed this...
Into this...
It's just a basic Italian sauce but very tasty! We had some of it with Fetuccine and mushrooms for dinner and it worked a treat. We have enough leftover for three more dinners so that is in the freezer now and all those beautiful tomatoes will bless us with their wonderful flavour for a few weeks to come!
It was a long, and busy day, and I am exhausted and having seen it all written out, I can see that we did actually accomplish quite a bit, since laundry got done and I also completed a quiz for Uni and scored 90% on it somewhere in amongst all that!
If you managed to read this far, you deserve a reward, so here is some chickie cuteness to send you on your way!
When
I posted on my blog recently about my chickens going nuts over canned
sardines, my friend DivaJyoti commented that she hadn't known chickens
would eat fish.
Chickens actually prefer to follow an omnivorous
diet. The chickens we know today, that scratch around in barnyards or
(sadly) rot away in battery farms, for shame! tend to be fed on a grain
based diet, more because it is convenient for us. The domestic hen, gallus domesticus is actually descended from the Jungle Fowl:
Jungle
Fowl originate from India, Sri Lanka, South East Asia, and Indonesia.
In their wild state, jungle fowl eat a varying diet consisting of
fruits, grains, vegetation, small rodents, lizards, bugs, slugs and
insects. When allowed to 'free range' our domestic chickens will do much
the same. I've heard of domestic fowl eating mice, lizards, beetles,
worms, caterpillars snails and slugs. In fact, a flock of chickens let
loose in a matured vegetable garden will nibble little bits of the
veges, but will also keep the garden almost completely pest free. They
particularly favour the larvae of coddling moth! Yesterday, I gave my
chooks 100g of kangaroo mince.
Someone
mentioned on a poultry forum I frequent, that feeding kangaroo meat to
chooks is an extreme sport. After trying this myself, I'd have to
concur.
There was none of that hesitant peering at it before taking a small
peck to taste it that you normally see when offering a new type of food. Rosie tried to rip the meat out of my hand before I
even got the wrapper off it!
Then it was on for young and old as my
gentle, 'boking', scratching hens turned into miniature velociraptors,
jumping up, flapping at me, trying to snatch beakfuls of meat out of my
fingers (they rarely eat from my hand) and chasing each other all over
the chook pen trying to snitch pieces out of each other's mouths. All
the while, they were making that special high pitched muuuur-uurrrrrr!
sound that chooks reserve for only the best and tastiest morsels.
The chooks were going absolutely stir crazy today after days being pent up because of wet weather, so I decided to let them out despite the rain. I'd been keeping them in, thinking that young chooks can get sick if they get wet, but after asking advice from some of my more experienced chicken keeping friends, I was assured that this only applies to chicks and young fowl less than 20 weeks of age.
All my girls are past 20 weeks, so I decided this morning, to let them out.
When I got to the henhouse, there was a pleasant surprise awaiting me. Bertha had laid her first egg! My 'baby' sussex is now a big girl.
Hers is the egg at right in the picture. Sadly, it got a little fouled in the production, which can happen occasionally, but it was easily washed. The plastic eggs at either end of the real ones are 'dummies' placed in the nest to encourage the hens to use the nestbox rather than laying out in the yard, or on the ground in the chicken run.
There was also a visitor in the yard, today. A little scrub turkey had come to call.
I think this was a male bird and only young as his wattles aren't fully developed as yet. I don't know if he was just passing through, or was checking out our yard with a view to building his nest mound here. He seemed a bit confused, thinking my birds were female scrub turkeys. He kept following them around, making his soft little Goob? Goob? call, but if he got too close either Boss, or Rosie chased him off. I left them alone as the chooks seemed to have the situation under control. The last I saw of "Goober" he was heading down the driveway at a jog after I shut the hens in for the night. I wonder if he decided this wasn't the best place for a nest after all?
The chooks seemed to enjoy their rainy day ramble and weren't too wet when I put them in for the night.
Bertha got a little muddy, though it is hard to see here.
Wynona looked the most bedraggled but Boss's
gloss is still present.
Nosie Rosie has wet hackles but the rest is fairly dry.
Waiting for dinner.
The wild bird mix that we have scattered for sprouting in what will be the summer run for the chooks is loving this wet weather!
So, that was the rainy day that was, here at Feathered Petticoats.
I had to take a trip to my doctor this morning for a general checkup and to get some prescriptions renewed for my meds, so when I got home, I decided I would do a quick checkup of the chooks.
I had bought some Colloidal Silver while I was out, having heard this is a handy tonic for either bacterial or viral infection and with Rosie still a little bit lack lustre, and Bertha occasionally still coughing, I decided to give both girls a dose (just one or two drops from an eyedropper) of CS internally.
After that was done, I thought it might be a good idea to weigh them all as I hadn't got a baseline weight since getting them. Rosie has filled out a bit again since I've been treating her for her mysterious weightloss and lethargy, so I thought it would be good to know just what she does weigh.
Each of my hens are what's known as 'first years' so they're probably not at their full adult weight yet, particularly Bertha who is a Light Sussex, a late maturing breed.
So, how do you weigh a chook? It's not as simple as just asking her to step onto the scales, after all and I don't have a hanging scale like my dad used to use for his chickens. I decided I'd have to do it the old fashioned way and step onto the scales myself, holding each hen by turns.
That actually worked out very well, and their weights are as follows.
Rosie (ISA Brown): 2.2kg (4.8pds) About right for the lower end of the scale with her breed. Would like to see her put on a little more though.
Bertha (Light Sussex): 3.5kg (7.7pds) Within a healthy weight for her breed, but there is no upper limit on weight in the standard, so she could put on more without it being too worrisome.
Boss: (Australorp Utility): 2.6kg (5.7pds) Again, not too bad for her type.
Wynona (Gold Laced Wyandotte): 2.8kg (6.16pds) She is close to the right weight for an adult of her breed, needs just a little fattening. More canned tuna for her!
Of course, I am not too obsessive over the weight of the chickens really. It's only a part of the picture and health in chickens is judged more by their laying, feeding, and sociability than their weight. All of them are eating well, foraging happily when they get the chance to free range, and are happy to scratch around and gossip with each other in their coop.
As for interest in food? Well, if the way they chased me all the way to the henhouse when they saw me with a can of sardines this afternoon is anything to go by...
There was none of that hesitant peering at it before taking a small
peck to taste it that you normally see when offering a new type of food. Rosie tried to rip the meat out of my hand before I
even got the wrapper off it! 
