Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Shadrach]

It's the stabilizing muscles firing little pulses to keep one balanced. Most people don't really include these muscles in exercise routines so they tend to be lacking in people who don't prioritize them with balance/yoga/core strength oriented exercises. They're made of slow twitch fibers, so I guess anything involving quick pulses pushes them a little harder than other methods, at least it feels that way to me. I've started pulse crunches as part of my weekly exercise and they feel pretty brutal

Tax: Gregg rulez
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40 seconds now. Right leg was badly broken years ago but oddly, it's more stable than my left which I haven't broken yet.
I was just shocked at how much my balance had deteriorated over the last five years. I do something about it every day.

 

[Vulpes vulpes]

There are quite a lot of reasons given with respect to the best known exponents of the behaviour (flamingos), though evidently at least one of them (their biomechanics) may well be inapplicable to chickens
https://bird-life.com/why-flamingos-stand-on-one-leg-the-real-reason-1-5504/

I thought the bit about unihemispheric slow wave sleep was particularly interesting. USWS is something I've talked about before because I think it's really cool, but I never considered the role it could play in resting on one leg. If one leg is controlled by the "awake" hemisphere and one is controlled by the "asleep" hemisphere, it seems intuitive to balance on one leg rather than coordinate both of them together.

An interesting sidebar on this: birds are capable of unihemispheric sleep because unlike eutherian mammals, which are the only animals with a corpus callosum, birds have no equivalent structure connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. The communication between these hemispheres is much more limited than with us. It's interesting to think about how their perspectives/consciousness might differ from ours. Is each bird really a pair of intimately connected individuals? I guess nobody is sure.

Further reading if anyone's interested:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7116194/

 

[kattabelly]

birds have no equivalent structure connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. The communication between these hemispheres is much more limited than with us. It's interesting to think about how their perspectives/consciousness might differ from ours. Is each bird really a pair of intimately connected individuals? I guess nobody is sure.

I'm going to (not very seriously) choose to believe this is why a few of mine will happily jump the gate several times a day when they want to leave the chicken plot, but run back and forth in confusion and panic if the gate isn't open when they want to get back in.

 

[fuzzi]

I'm going to (not very seriously) choose to believe this is why a few of mine will happily jump the gate several times a day when they want to leave the chicken plot, but run back and forth in confusion and panic if the gate isn't open when they want to get back in.

"Birdbrains"?

 

[Vulpes vulpes]

I'm going to (not very seriously) choose to believe this is why a few of mine will happily jump the gate several times a day when they want to leave the chicken plot, but run back and forth in confusion and panic if the gate isn't open when they want to get back in.

If it helps, the left hemisphere dominates tasks that require more focus, while the right hemisphere has a more broad attention. Simply put, the left hyperfixates and the right is easily distracted. Incorporate this however you like next time you tease them