Search results for query: *

What worked for us was specifically putting a squirt of lemon-scented Joy detergent in blown-out eggs, rubbing some Joy over the outside of blown-out eggs, adding full-height dividers between nesting boxes, adding curtains over the entrance to the nesting boxes, checking for eggs every 2-3 hours...

Is it okay to feed layer feed if there is a rooster in the flock too?

I decided to blunt his spurs and nails. But I can't catch him. He is too cautious and too quick. My coop is also not one where I can walk into and snag him off his roost. Any ideas?

Thank you for all your thoughtful replies. It's a lot to think about. Here are some photos showing his relative size and some of the feather loss.

We have a rooster mating with five hens. He is much larger than them. His spurs have caused feather damage to the backs of a couple of his favorite hens, to the point where we bought chicken saddles for them. After even more time, he has caused the removal of feathers around the sides and backs...

The only unscreened holes are at the edge of the lapped siding boards and sides of the R-panel metal roofing, and an egg will not fit through them. Here are some photos. p.s. The golf balls have never disappeared.

Reappeared in an adjacent, different nesting box. Three have gone missing. Some time passes between the placement and disappearances, a few days at least. First one missing was real and one of three marked with a hash. (At this time, my thought was a snake.) I removed the remaining two and...

No, they are roughly 32-inches off the ground. The floor of the coop is 24-inches off the ground. Nesting boxes are 8-inches above the floor of the coop.

Real

The coop has hardware cloth floor, so no shavings in the main area. Minimal shavings in the nesting boxes.

My coop is up off the ground and I have carpet tack strips everywhere to prevent animals climbing. Any openings into the coop are much smaller than an egg size. It's possible a snake could eat an egg and digest it and get back out I suppose. But one could not eat a ceramic egg and get out

We have no children and my wife is as stumped as me. I had a trail cam directly above the nesting box with the marked eggs. The images of the eggs were mostly obscured with the hens. I thought one was being eaten until a ceramic egg disappeared.

That's extremely unlikely here. We are very rural. And I've had a trail cam on the coop also.

We have five hens and a rooster. We very rarely ever collect five eggs in one day. Mostly we get two, three, or four eggs. We usually let the chickens out of the coop for a couple hours before sunset. They return to roost every evening. A couple months ago, I marked three eggs and left them in...

She wore the saddle for less than a week. Today she somehow got out of it with it still snapped. I bought the one from The Chicken Chick, which had the elastic straps and snaps. It will be tiresome if I have to put it on very often.

Update: the saddle arrived yesterday and we put it on her, not rather gracefully last night. Today will be her first day wearing it. Thanks for the advice. While the rooster's spurs are not terribly long or sharp compared to some pictures I've seen on here, would trimming and blunting his...

I have not, so thanks for letting me know. He did appear to stay on a long while and be rough when I saw him breed her a little while ago. Is there any reason I should try to catch her and apply hydrocortisone to her skin, or is that pointless?

Update: the feather damage has broken all of the feathers down to the skin. And now I see a red abrasion or sore where it might have drawn blood. Is there anything you do with this? (We don't have another coop to move her to for recovery.)

This was beautiful and helps us tremendously. Thank you!

no :(