A boy and his chickens

[thatpotteryguy]

It was very damp and windy and consequently uncomfortable yesterday in the chicken coops. At one point when I went out to check for eggs, I thought that we were missing a hen. Upon further investigation, I found Lucy, one of our Barred Cornish Rocks, cuddling with Pineapple, one of the bantam Wheatens.

Comments

[pinkleader]

I was watching the Dirty Jobs where Mike Rowe joins the Chicken Busters in Miami, and thought of you. Some were very pretty chickens, just running wild. Apparently they only catch 30% of the feral chickens.

[pixel39]

Chicken Busters?

[pinkleader]

http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/dirty-jobs-chicken-buster/

Apparently Miami has a problem with rogue feral chickens as folks will get chicks for pets and then release them when they start to cock-a-doodle-doo as they get older.

[pixel39]

That's wild. Now I have this odd image of chicken gangs prowling the streets of Miami.

Someone a couple blocks over from us had a chicken--it was large and goldenish. I saw it a couple of times, hanging out on their lawn. It had to have been a pet chicken because MN winters are cold enough that a feral chicken probably wouldn't have survived.

[thatpotteryguy]

Nah. Chickens are OK in the open to 20 below or so...there are folks in Canada who free-range them all year long. The only thing they absolutely need is shelter from the wind and damp. A nice nest of long grass or straw keeps them pretty warm. Oh, a high-calorie, fatty diet helps, too. You know, like from fast-food dumpsters.

That said, chickens are emphatically close to the bottom of most local food chains. Especially in a place like MN, is was almost certainly a pet - too many predators around for a feral to survive in your area.

[thatpotteryguy]

Yeah, because it's tough to send the pets to freezer camp...

OTOH, it's a little surprising, because chickens are a prey animal for so very many urban predators - feral cats, dogs, racoons, and so on. I guess the ones smart enough to survive are smart enough to evade capture.