Recently in Poultry Category

So, as some of you will be aware by now we've had chickens for 18 months. We presently have 6 birds, 1 Black Maran, 1 Speckledy, 1 Whitestar Leghorn, 1 Cambridge Blue and two Light Sussex bantams. They all lay, some of the time. The leghorn used to be daily but recently she is moulting (bad time of year for it if you ask me).

And now for the news, I said Birds & Bees; I’m going to start having Bees. I’ve joined our local Bee club and I’ve bought a couple of hives, one ‘commercial’ (style of hive) from ebay and one ‘deep national’ from a very nice chap on a beekeeping forum. Now I just need tools and protective clothes.

I’ve got 2 mentors of a sort, both ex-BBC, who have very different ideas on Bees, and a whole host of people locally from the Bee club I can talk to for advice, so I’m REALLY not going to go short there. Only problem is where to keep them, allotment people want a certificate of competence, which I won’t be seeing for 2 years or so, and one of the neighbours is a bit notorious at not liking anything we do; They called out the environmental health last Christmas because of the chickens, they arrived and said there was no problem whatsoever and we were doing everything we should have been doing.

So I am going to start in the garden and see how things go, unless I can find another location.

So either way I thought I’d use the body of this post to keep lots of useful info I’ve been discussing with people so I don’t loose it

So its would seem that our white leghorn has been plucking and eating feathers from the other chickens. Apparently this might be boredom, protein deficiency or not enough greens. One way or the other we will have to do something, we have 3 chickens now with bare bottoms and its been snowing outside.

We have chickens, 5 of them to be precise. A Rhode Island Red hybreed, 2 Light Sussex bantams, 1 Bluebelle and a White Leghorn.

The hybreed was the first and used to have a ‘sister’ but she died within 2 weeks of buying her from a local breeder. We had already had 2 chickens which we took back because they were infested with lice, so it shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise.

When she died some good friends of ours who live in Somerset, Alex and Gavin, were coming to visit us and very kindly brought us the light sussex bantams from a breeder near where they lived. When they arrived they looked like pigeons rather than chickens, as they were about 5-6 weeks old.

We got the White Leghorn and the Bluebelle from some extremely nice people at Cambridge Poultry. I would deffinitely say I would recommend them, although its a bit of a trek from where we live.