Recent content by cundare

I bet she does settle down, although it might take a month or two. Whatever is driving her behavior could well be a function of how small and helpless she is at the moment. Then again, as she matures, the endless chirping may evolve into something even louder and more relentless! I guess only...

I'll be interested to learn what kind of adult she turns into. Is this unusual infant behavior a predictor that she'll be an unusual adult?

Sometimes a bird (not only a chick) will learn that certain behavior elicits a desired response. And then they perform that behavior when they want that response, even if it's not something that most birds would do. We had one rooster & hen that learned that when they gave a predator call, I'd...

It's sickening. And the attitude around here about chickens is hostile and ignorant. There are letters in the paper calling for the execution of feral chickens, there's a (never-enforced) law against a single property owner owning more than two birds, unless the property is a farm, and the...

Yes, but it doesn't matter. Some of the ethnic groups here have claimed that it's part of their ethnic heritage and that breaking up rings is racist. In fact, that was argued in the State legislature, by an elected congressman. Still, it is illegal and the last year, enforcement efforts have...

Cockfighting just boggles my mind. How could anybody find that to be anything other than sickening. We later rescued a second rooster that had escaped from a local fighting ring with one eye. He was in bad shape, but good food and a protected environment helped him to bounce back. It took a...

When our first, injured "rescue rooster" wandered into our yard, escaped from a cockfighting ring, we never suspected how endlessly fascinating these birds would be. Now I can't conceive of not having chickens in the family. Learning how they see and hear the world adds yet another nuance to...

@Winterdear: You should read the Scientific American article. Birds don't seem to be able to tell the difference between changing keys. They hear tiny differences in timbre. So I bet they easily distinguish between different voices. This topic of research is still in its infancy, so I'd be...

I found it. May 2022 issue, title "What Birds Really Listen for in Birdsong (It’s Not What You Think)", author Adam Fishbein, subtitle "Birds seem to pay more attention to fine acoustic details that humans cannot hear than to the melodies that captivate us."...

Scientific American published an interesting article a few years ago, maybe just pre-pandemic, about the way that birds hear. I think anybody in this thread would find it as fascinating as I do. If nobody can find it, I'll try to dig up my photocopy for date, title, etc. The upshot was that...

I guess I'll have to do that. I was hoping that she'd lose interest when her clutch of eggs changed, but she's still brooding. Next time she leaves the nest, I'll take the wooden eggs. Is there any chance that the eggs we removed will hatch after the fact? After one day, they're still all...

Well, I took the eggs yesterday, when she was briefly off the nest, taking some food. She didn't see me do it. I swapped the 11 real eggs for 4 wooden imitation eggs. She's sitting on them now. I tried giving her some live food last night -- a favorite! -- and she attacked me. She pecked so...

This is so hard. We try to take care of the birds that adopt our yard, and their offspring, especially "rescue" birds that have escaped from, or been discarded from, cockfighting rings because of their injuries. We don't cage them and try to give them a good quality of life, including good...

I guess I do need to act soon. I think she's pretty safe hidden where she is, and the only nocturnal predators we have here are neighborhood cats, which don't have a history of attacking birds in our yard. But yes, she is looking stressed, so maybe we have to do this. The problem is she...

Well, here's the situation, which I didn't go into before. These are all free-rangers. They have no coop, but normally sleep in a large mango tree on the property. They fly into the upper branches every night where they're pretty safe. This hen found a hiding spot on the ground where even we...