Worming

April 16th, 2009 .

Today my order of Flubenvet arrived in the post so I started the process of worming the girls. The instructions on the bottle say that half of the container is enough to medicate 100kg of chicken feed and that I should feed it to them every day for 7 days. Unfortunately this isn’t practical with such a small amount of birds so I had to look up the correct dosage on the net. I managed to find the information here.

Apparently I am supposed to give the girls approximately 0.12 grams of Flubenvet each day of the treatment, so I used my digital scales to measure out 0.35 grams and mixed it with a little cooking oil. I then added a large handful of mixed corn and stirred it in the mixture. The oil meant that the medicine coated he corn and didn’t simply fall to the bottom of the container (Flubenvet is a fine powder). I put it in the run and the girls ate the lot.

It was raining all day today and the floor of the run was turning into a bit of a swamp, so I thought it was probably a good time to let the girls out and give it a bit of a clean. I came inside to cook dinner and pretty much left them to it. At one point I looked out the window and the grey one had managed to find another scrap of silicon sealant in the garden somewhere so I ran outside and chased her around the garden. Unfortunately she managed to eat it! I had a look where she had been scratching around and found some more sticking out of the ground. I can’t see any more but I do worry about the kind of rubbish that they eat when they are out in the garden.

Whilst I was in the house the girls kept coming up to the French doors and peering in with their beaks right up to the window. Then, after I had eaten my dinner I was sitting watching tv when the grey one came up to the door and tried to jump in! She looked pretty startled when she hit the window!

Creepy Crawlies

April 12th, 2009 .

Today Yu Lee’s mum came down to visit us and offered to help me dig a new border in my garden.  We have a flower bed which extends half way down one side of our garden, so today we extended it all the way down to the back of the garden.  Whilst Yu Lee’s mum did the digging I hunted for bugs and fed them ot the chickens which was great fun!  At first we found a few worms but eventually we started to come across some really horrible looking grubs.

We found loads of these and the chickens loved them!

We found loads of these and the chickens loved them!

When we gave any of the larger bugs to the chickens they would run around the pen chasing each other trying to get the bugs.  At one point we found a massive worm and they chased each other around for about 10 minutes before one of them finally managed to eat it.  At the moment the girls are all laying down in the pen so I think we have worn them out with all of the excitement.

The chickens chased each other around the pen trying to get the bugs

The chickens chased each other around the pen trying to get the bugs