Bird Talk

What kind of parrot is this?This parrot/bird/parakeet appeared in my carob tree last Thursday. He comes by every morning and eats from our birdfeeder, then comes back at night to hit it for dinner. I have no idea what kind of bird this is but I must assume since this isn’t South Africa or the Amazon, that this is an escapee. Like the Parrots of Telegraph Hill. He has a bright orange bill but is otherwise entirely green. He makes lots of bird noises, including his favorite, which is a loud sqwawk. He terrorizes my dog too. He arrives bright and early, gives a loud shriek causing my dog to spring to life from under the covers at 6am. She then proceeds to whine until we let her out and then they yell at each other for ten minutes.

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Several people have sent me a link to the Ikea hacker blog, which is featuring a chicken coop made from Ikea furniture.  It's so clever!  I notice that they don't detail how much it cost, but it looks like it would be a lot easier to put together than making your own from actual lumber, like I am.

I'm about two thirds finished with the third chicken tractor.  To recap, the first chicken tractor that I built was really lousy.  It was kicked apart by the big dogs on its first afternoon.  Fortunately I happened to be looking out the window at the time, so I was able to catch it before any of the chickens escaped.

The second chicken tractor is in use right now.  I built it with a two story design, so that the coop is directly over the run.  Unfortunately, it turns out the chickens do not like to go up and down through a hole in the floor.  Who knew?

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I had never really thought about grocery store chickens until I started raising my own.  The chickens you buy at the grocery store are universally the Cornish X (Cornish Cross) breed.  This breed was developed by crossing the Cornish and Plymouth Rock breeds, with the goal of a chicken that will put on a lot of muscle very quickly.  In fact, most of the whole chickens you find at the store are between six and nine weeks old.

It is possible to buy industrial strains of Cornish X chicks to raise at home, and many people do.  April, who writes the Coal Creek Farm blog, recently went through the slaughter process with her Cornish X chickens.  She also blogged periodically about them as she was raising them - they ate a phenomenal amount of feed!  Although she purchased 20 chicks, she only ended up with 17 edible carcasses.  Two of the chicks died early on, and a third was sick at butchering time.

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I've read that 1 in 1,000 eggs has double yolks, so it is likely that you could encounter this even with a small backyard flock of chickens.  To go back to the car wash analogy in my previous post, a double yolk egg can occur one of two ways:

1.     More than one "grape" (ovum) drops into the oviduct at once.  This often happens with young pullets, whose reproductive system is still working on getting properly synchronized.  It can also be hereditary in some cases - a few people have reported that their hens (usually heavy breeds) always lay double yolk eggs.

In the car wash analogy, this is as if two cars went through bumper-to-bumper, rather than individually with plenty of space between them.

2.    Ovum #1 gets hung up in the line, until ovum #2 comes along and knocks it loose.  The two ova then travel down the rest of the oviduct together.  Imagine one car gets hung up in the car wash, and the next car bumps into it.  They then move through the rest of the car wash in lock step.

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