If you like chickens you’re going
to love the wonderfully
warped humor of Doug Savage.
This guy takes chicken satire
to a whole new level. His website is a great place to stroll through
years and years of this daily peek into a parallel universe where
chickens talk to each other and travel through time.
Ed from Texas emailed to let
me know that he’d put together a video of his chickens drinking from
his brand new bucket waterer. He also mentioned
that his birds had been a bit afraid of the waterer at first, even
though he tempted them closer with cheerios, spinach, and finally a
plate of water underneath. He wrote:
Last year, we had
several people return their waterers claiming that their chickens
couldn’t figure out how to drink. This year, though, people seem
to trust us more, and are willing to give the waterer a second shot
even if their chickens are more recalcitrant than the average bird (who
usually picks the new watering method up in less than an hour.)
Thanks for giving it
another go, Ed! Your chickens will thank you too — but you have
clearly figured that out already, since you already ordered another homemade
chicken waterer kit.
After
harvesting
the sunflowers and
hanging them up to dry for a couple of weeks, I decided to split the
crop with our chickens. I brushed the seeds out of the biggest
sunflowers by hand while the heads were still malleable, and set the
seeds aside to dry for next year’s planting and to make oil. The
smaller heads were earmarked for our flock.
I took Bethany’s advice
and hung
one sunflower plant upside down in our oldest hens’ tractor. When I came back to
check on them an hour later, the seed heads were nearly bare, but one
hen kindly went back to work and posed for the camera. Clearly,
the sunflowers in their natural state are no problem for keen chicken
beaks.