Recent content by MTchick

I gave up on the forum in the interest of spending less time online. But I have to comment on this one! Not only am I in the video several times (no, I am not the one that eats her chicken) but I was on the Missoula City Council Urban Fowl Subcommittee. The whole thing is insane. I will sum up...

Our new ordinance has now been approved by everyone (the chicken committee, animal control, committee on public health, the local agriculture groups) except for the city council itself. This means that if it passes (which we believe it will), then this is the wording that will be in the official...

Just a quick thought; I've used those carts before, they are great, but they often are built from really cheap thin plywood. You will be bearing a lot of weight on that thing, so it might be best to replace/reinforce the walls and floor of the cart pretty heavily before you start to build the...

I had a bird that did this two or three times when she was younger. As far as I can tell, she drank too much water and because chickens don't have a real restrictor muscle in their throats (they don't really swallow so much as gulp), when she leaned over after drinking a lot of water, it came...

Sounds to me like it is an abscess or hematoma with a drainage. Basically, a bloody infection, or a bad bruise that is also leaking some fluids. Either way the hen is going to be prone to infection and antibiotics might be a really good idea. Is there something in the coop (like an exposed...

That is a sad situation, but it underlines the fact that if you take action like that (shoot something) then sometimes the repercussions are quite serious. Whenever I read about people threatening to shoot dogs, hawks, etc I always wonder if they realize the can of worms that they might be...

It hit 105 here yesterday and the hens were displeased! It has been like this for about 3 days. Ugggh. My hens seem to be coping OK- one thing they seem to really like is I let them out of their run into the yard. They have a couple of shady, dark spots that they all congregate in (especially...

Sick, rabid coons like the day. Normal, healthy coons hunt at night. Either way they are bad for chickens, but if you see a raccoon during the middle of the day doing things like eating garbage in the sunlight or walking around in an open area, call animal control or another authority...

Fisher are pretty large, really. They are big weasels and thus do have the tendency to kill a lot but eat very little. However, I would think this was actually a smaller type of weasel- like an ermine, or maybe a long tailed weasel. Or a feral domestic cat. The stinky poo suggests some kind of...

Don't forget (which I always do) that the farthest-out piece of wood needs to be the biggest. So if you have 3/4 inch plywood, the length of the walls can be 8 foot on the outside but it should be built with 2x4s that are 7 ft 10.5 inches long. You'll have to scale down again by the width of the...

There is no way my 7 hens make as much poop as my 70 lbs dog in terms of the amount that you need to remove. While they might produce the same quantity by weight, I have to hand-remove all the dog poo from the yard to prevent the death of my lawn, while I leave the bird poo there and it...

Squirrels are the leading predators of small baby birds and eggs in most suburban areas. They are actually quite aggressive predators of small, weak creatures. I'd be willing to be money it was a squirrel. Other than that, a raccoon would be a good guess. -MTchick

Looking at your design right now as I see it, I think the easiest thing to do would be to cut a 2x4 to fit directly below the roofline, directly under the 2x2 that is the roof "peak," and nail it into place. This is the red line in my drawing. Then, measure the distance between that plank and...

I think one looks to me like a hen. But the rest of the EEs look rooster-ish. My one EE hen still has a yellow-pink comb and she is about 13 weeks old. -MTchick

Slaughter traditionally means to kill lots of things at once- you don't really slaughter one chicken, you just kill it. You slaughter 20 of them. There has been talk of removing that from the ordinance because so many people are thinking along your lines- they misinterpret the intent of that...