Will a chicken eat a mouse?
I wouldn’t expect a Cornish
Cross to even try, but
most other breeds might give it a taste test if they’re hungry enough.
I’ve never heard of anybody raising mice for this reason, but it might
work as a feed supplement if you fed your chickens the smaller, younger
ones.
Image credit goes to Youtube
user ThE cHicKeN cHaNnEL Fowl Play.
I hate to admit it, but our duck experiment was a dismal failure. We chose Ancona ducks because they came highly recommended by Carol Deppe, but either the breed or the species seems to be a poor fit for our homestead. When the ducklings were small enough to dabble in our sky pond, I loved the way they foraged for their own food, but keeping them on dry land
has been much more of a hassle. The requisite open bucket of
water turns into mud within hours, and the ducks then proceed to turn
the entire area around the bucket into mud too.
I could probably deal with the mud problem, though, if our ducks weren’t
so darn lazy. At first, I thought maybe the waterfowl were spending their
entire day hanging out in one spot because they were in a hillside
pasture, and hills were too hard for their webbed feet. However, I
moved the flock into a flat pasture full of low weeds and clover (and
even took away their open water bucket) and the waterfowl still lay about all
day.
For the sake of
comparison, here’s what the tractored hens were doing on the same hot
afternoon that I took the second photo in this post. Despite being
confined to a small space, these Red Stars were busy working up the ground where I plan to set out fall broccoli next week, hunting for worms in the process.
If we were in the market
for pets, not working livestock, ducks might be keepers, but Mark and I
both agreed that we’d be better off cutting our losses before we have to
deal with open buckets of mud in the winter. We’ll soon be dining
on ducks and hunting down a few point-of-lay pullets to expand our new
laying flock.
The photo above shows the
new tree alley in our starplate pasture, where I’m focusing on soil
building this year. I grew a rye cover crop there over the winter,
left the chickens in the pasture for two full weeks in May, then tossed down buckwheat and sunflower seeds. My goal at the time was to do back-to-back buckwheat plantings
the way I do in the vegetable garden to build organic matter fast in
summer-fallow areas, but one look at the blooming buckwheat changed my
mind. Clearly, this soil is still very poor, since the cover crop
is blooming at a third to a half of the height it does in my vegetable
garden.
I haven’t done a soil
test in the starplate pasture, but my eye-balling of the earth while
digging swales suggests that it’s got a good texture and is
well-drained. In the vegetable garden, I’d add a couple of inches
of horse manure to an area like this and would be able to plant into it
right away, but I never have enough horse manure to “waste” it on a
pasture. The solution? Chickens, of course. I’ll turn
our young flock back into this tree alley for another week or two,
letting them eat what they can and add plenty of manure to the soil,
then will plant another round of buckwheat and see how the cover crop
grows. My goal is to have the tree alley in good condition by this
winter when the time comes to plant out my spring-grafted apple trees, and I’m willing to force our flock to graze on subpar pasture in the interim if necessary to reach that goal.