What’s a good way to feed
June Bugs to chickens?
Fill a 5 gallon bucket half
way with water. Place the bucket under a light and leave it all night.
The next morning you should have 10 to 20 June Bug snacks ready to feed
to your flock. Spill the bucket near your chickens and watch them get
happy.
A few might get away, but
most will be gobbled up before they can achieve flight.
Image credit goes to
Wikipedia.
After whittling down our
replacement layer flock to a cockerel and three pullets, I decided to
merge the chickens with our young ducks. The starplate pastures
where the young layer flock has been browsing is pretty barren at the
moment, since the sward hasn’t entirely developed yet and since lack of
rain has slowed regrowth of what herbaceous plants do exist. In
contrast, the duck coop has three lush pastures around it, very little of which the ducks are deigning to eat and almost none of which the Cornish Cross broilers
consumed. Why not move the hens down to eat that greenery, and
also save me from having to manage food and water in two separate coops?
Mark and I always move
chickens at night, counting on the birds’ inability to see in the dark
to make the transition go smoothly. Plus, if a hen wakes up inside
a new coop, you often don’t even have to shut her inside for a day to
teach her that’s her new roosting spot — she just heads back inside
the next night to eat and sleep. I didn’t count on how aggressive
the ducks would be at having their slumber interrupted by gallinaceous
interlopers, though. The ensuing ruckus was so loud that I began
to despair of the two flocks’ ability to merge successfully, but I
crossed my fingers and went to bed.
The
next morning, there was a standoff in the coop — ducks on one end and
chickens on the other. When I opened the pophole to let them all
out onto pasture, the rooster immediately took his harem up on the hill
where ducks couldn’t easily waddle, and he stood guard between his
ladies and the terrifying waterfowl for hours. However, when I
dropped back by after lunch, a hen was walking between the ducks with no
one batting an eyelash, and the other chickens were inside enjoying
their repast — a good sign for domestic tranquility to come.
Despite the initial drama, it’s looking like merging a duck and chicken
flock will be easier than putting two packs of unfamiliar chickens
together.
The multi-tiered roosting station Mark made in the starplate coop has been working like a charm. Local legend has it that using red cedar branches in this application will keep mites
at bay, but I have to admit our chickens are so healthy we’ve never
seen a mite with or without cedar perches. Still, the cedar roosts
are well-received, with everyone who fits perching on the top tier and
with any spillover enjoying the middle perch. (The lowest perch
was for chicks, and it did its job well.)
The astute reader will notice that there’s no bedding
under the roost. Usually, I like to keep all coop floors
completely covered with leaves and/or straw, counting on the high-carbon
material to hold onto the nitrogen in the chicken manure. With
such a big coop and with so few birds involved, though, I’ve let the
chicken droppings just fall onto the dirt floor in the starplate
coop. I plan to scoop the manure out soon and apply it to the poor
soil in the tree alley, which should take care of any slight smell that would otherwise develop in the coop.