Ozzie & Harriet: Poultry Thread

[Bear Up North]

This Bear lived in very rural Henry County for a lot of years. When I lived there I raised all kinds of poultry. I had a large fenced-in area, connected to a small barn. I used plastic wading pools for ponds.....having to clean them once a week.
I had fresh duck and chicken eggs all of the time.

Ozzie & Harriet: These were my African geese. Very tall, with real long necks amd unusual-shaped lumps on their heads. Ozzie looked like the fat cartoon birds you always saw, with a cartoon character visualizing him in a stewing pot. One (1) winter I found him face down in the snow......probably a heart attack.

Harriet was thin and a bitxx. When I went out to feed the birds Harriet would run up to me and circle me, continually, squawking and squawking. Ozzie would let me touch him......Harriet, never. When we moved from the mini-farm my son took Harriet over to the area's autistic housing complex, for their ponds.

Chester: A woman who worked with me lived on a farm with a big pond. One (1) small duck became frozen.....one (1) leg only.....in the pond's ice. She had to cut the leg off and she gave he the duck.....which I named Chester. He was a friendly guy....loved people.....hobbled, of course.

Peepers: Don't remember how we got Peepers. We got him when he was just a little baby duck. He followed us around, all over the yard. When we sat on the front porch he would sit with us, watching the corn grow.

Roostie: We had a rooster who did what roosters do.....every morning about 4:00 AM he was doing his ****-a-doodle-do routine.

We also had bard rock chickens (good eating and great for soup). We tried "silky" chickens but they didn't taste good, didn't want to lay eggs, and always attacked legs when you went in the pen.

Finally, we also had (and still have) an unusual non-poultry farm animal. We have a 400-pound concrete pig, named Wilbur. Wilbur has his own dish with his name on it. He is out by the 2-story garage, standing guard.

Bear Box T-188

[Zoning Goddess]

Never had them myself, but my next-door neighbors keep trying. We're in a residential area; so far they've had 2 sets of ducks and a few chickens which keep disappearing (gators, maybe, we have a pond out back). Then a few years ago, they rescued a pig, Tulip, which became enormous and would escape quite often, and had to be lured home with a bowl of Doritos. They finally told their kids they were sending Tulip to "a farm". Hah.

[Bear Up North]

Thanks to that pesky rooster in Chet's post in the RANDOM thread, this thread has cracked open. There was just one response to the original thread. Perhaps newer residents of this place we call Cyburbia will enlighten us with some interesting fowl stories.

And then again, perhaps not.

Good luck, Chet.

Bear

[Maister]

I've dealt with maybe 8-10 'chickens in residential' complaints over the years. Some communities (usually the more rural) allow them and it is no big deal, but most tend to prohibit the practice. I can see where roosters crowing in the pre-dawn hours could be something of a nuisance, but otherwise don't see what the problem is. Typically we'll only hear a complaint if it's a month or two after Easter and someone's cute little chicks are starting to (gasp) grow.

In response to the growing chorus of 'consume local' sentiment, town to the north of us recently amended their code to allow chickens in residential areas (within certain parameters).

[Bear Up North]

Cracking open (again) a real olde thread, related to poultry and peeling-off the current eggs thread. Let me tell you about wooden eggs.....

A lot of folks who raise chickens also purchase some wooden eggs. They are the same size as chicken eggs. You use them to "fool" the chickens. Usually the chickens who have tasted the inside of an egg (perhaps it rolled on to a floor and broke open) realize that it is pretty tasty. If you periodically place wooden eggs in their nesting area it usually stops the eating-their-own-eggs situation. It also seems to encourage a chicken to stop walking around and clucking and get on the nest and lay, lay, lay. I wonder what ever happened to my wooden eggs. Gosh, I hope I didn't eat them.

We had ducks, too. Duck eggs are darker and have much-darker yokes. They are quite tasty.

Farmer Bear