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Do you want the pics posted to this thread?

I made it home briefly early afternoon and the chicks were still hiding under the big fig tree. I was able to count 9 head at that point. When I got home mid evening they were feeding outside of a large azalea bush. When I tried to count them they ducked in the bush. Before sunset I saw them in...

If you find yourself in need of eliminating the fox, the FWC offers permits on demand from their website. When you click “submit” the permit will be approved and emailed to you automatically.

I think I’m about in line with you in terms of longitude. Its been low 90s in the day and 60s at night. The 5 older chicks are fine this morning and are intermingling with the main free range flock. The 10 younger chicks are hiding in deep cover and I can’t see how many survived the night...

I’m going to see if these chicks get eliminated or thrive. My instinct is to pull them off of free range and coop them with a heat plate. But I’m going to let nature take its course. The older 5 are feathered out and roosting off the ground. I’m pretty sure they’ll be fine. The younger 10 still...

I like that. I can't see a survival advantage to abandoning chicks while they're very young. I like hens that stay with chicks for a long time. My pet peeve are hens that tree roost at 2-3 weeks and leave the biddies on the ground. I'm dealing with two hens now that have left their 15 biddies...

For those of you with free-range hens with chicks, at what ages or stages of development are you noticing that hens are leaving chicks to fend for themselves, whether it be for a little while or a long time/permanently, if at all prior to adulthood? Do you notice differences between genetic...

I was thinking about “Florida woods chicken” if they stabilize into a breed. I think they’re going to end up looking like a bigger version of the Carolina bantam. I have 5 hens and 1 stag that all have the same general build and color. Black with brown penciling on the hens and black and...

I think the RIR likely changed from its original form as a free-range, duel purpose, tough-as-nails, American farm chicken to a mass-produced product for feed stores. Yes, for today’s purposes, you may want to up the percentage of oriental blood. I don’t think its because the original RIR...

It would be enlightening to have antidotal but accurate records of what particular aggressive roosters would and would not attack. It would be logical to consider that a rooster that attacks dogs and hawks with the same extreme prejudice that he attacks humans would be attacking things he...

The RIR was in fact created by crossing oriental gamefowl to leghorns about a century ago. Hatcheries ruined their free-range potential IMO over the subsequent decades. Reinfusing some fresh oriental genes into them ought to work. That’s actually one of the strategies I advocate in my upcoming...

5 months is a long time for one to go without an attack. The bad ones I’ve had never could go more than 2 or 3 days after I administered a beatdown to them before they were ready to go again. It would also make sense to me that poor eyesight would be a factor in human aggression. Imagine a...

I definitely wouldn’t think that imprinting is the only factor. I don’t even think that human aggression is a monolithic phenomenon. I suspect there are different kinds and levels of human aggression that arise from different causes. The sort of human aggression I think of as the kind that’s...

I don’t think they’re all capable of the same levels of imprinting, with imprinting behavior having been greatly modified by human selection over recent decades/centuries. I am aware of a study that showed a significant difference in how imprinting worked between red junglefowl and factory white...

I think it depends on how the human interacts with them after hatching. I incubate mine in a dark barn. I only interact with the chicks behind a flash light. When I move them outside a day or two after hatching, they only ever see me when I bring food and change their water. I think that’s the...

I’ve bred many human-aggressive roosters from other farms and of all the roosters I’ve produced from the human-aggressive fathers, none have been human aggressive except 1 (one out of likely several hundred). I tend to believe that human aggression is often due to imprinting instead of genetics...

Were any of the aggressive roosters hen-raised, or artificially incubated?

I made the mistake of tightly controlling breeding on the front end by culling roosters that didn’t meet physical (and often superficial) criteria before they could breed. I also wouldn’t let roosters fight for dominance, instead culling out young stags before they could challenge the brood...

I actually just did a video about this: I use commercial food to start then I wean them off. Its an easy and efficient process when they have a mother hen as she helps them forage and can forage them younger than when its a group of artificially incubated chicks.

There are 13 Spring 2024 improved Crackers. There are 2 pure Cracker hens off setting somewhere that will either come out with 3/4 Cracker biddies or with aseel x Liege mixed in, depending on which free-range rooster bred them.