chickens-- more specifically hens....
2020 12 14
This may only serve as cocktail party conversation but there are a few things I do know about chickens -----the quantity of that is vastly inferior to what I don't know about chickens .however---In the egg laying Department you don't need a rooster---so to put together my brief history with this -----strombergs is one of the many hatcheries out there in Iowa someplace that hatches baby chickens .. and you can order them and buy them---- on second thought maybe strombergs is a company in India that is the Amazon of the chicken world and only logs in all these hatcheries who knows ....so I very carefully go through the catalog and pick out chickens that lay white eggs Brown eggs & blue eggs an order baby chickens who will eventually do that .. now you can order 25 chickens as hatched .. which in all probability would give you 12 Roosters or you can order females only .. and strombergs brags about 99% accuracy at sexing a baby chicken .. which apparently I'm told has to be done in the first 24 hours after hatching ... 30 years ago it seemed that telling the sex of a chicken was a specialty of the Japanese people so I was told and the one hatchery around here that I go and visited sure enough there was a person of obvious Oriental persuasion figuring out which chicken was a girl and which was a boy ..now I think they have some other way but at any rate I ordered girls .. at last time we got them I think it was 30 baby chickens .. so with all those probabilities how did I end up with four Roosters ? only one of those Roosters is of the kind who's female counterpart would have laid white Brown or blue eggs .. so in other words somehow I've acquired three roosters .
there are a lot of laws written about Roosters and how you can’t have them in neighborhoods and I can certainly understand why .. especially since we have a camera person who logs in every sound on the property all night long and a good 90% of the noise off this property at night is Roosters ..
there is another farm in topsfield where their chicken bunch are adjacent to the street .. so they know when people passing by toss a rooster into there pen of hens .
Not wanting to serve the rooster up for Sunday dinner that specific rooster which was an odd colored rooster appeared in my group of hens .. and for awhile he lived over by the donkey's cafe .. and was rumored to be very mean .. he however seems to have mellowed and now lives in the chicken coop with everybody else the “everybody else” is now 3 other Roostersand 30 hens wiht10 guinnea hens ---- so if you believe everything you read we'd have fights all the time----but we don't seem to .. and seeing as all the hens now seem to be flying the coop and are all over the property it's kind of interesting that the big Brown rooster as one Brown hen that stays with him .... by now there are chickens all over the place .. I try to encourage egg leg in the chicken coop but it's not unusual to find a dozen eggs a lot of other places ..
A side line to dog training -- At one point these dogs would be chasing those chickens and we would be frantic trying to deal with prey drive it's called .. it's interesting and since I had the long discussion with Gemini about the fact that these were my chickens not his toys to chase . ..... We don't seem to have any chicken chasing dogs .
I don't understand why that's true but it is ..
?where to go next with this rooster topic ? This could go to advertising , movie making , or police phone calls at 4:00 AM ..
Advertising And how the mind can be trained .. in the state of New York the eggs you see in the supermarket are white .. and Brown eggs are considered foreign .. whereas in Massachusetts ----” Brown eggs are local egs and local eggs are good” --is the way the ad goes .. consequently the only time you see white eggs in Massachusetts is just before Easter when people are trying to dye them colors .... you never say the naturally blue eggs the general public just couldn't put up with that .
while you're looking at your egg carton .. remember the daily doggy that discussed the fact that the egg cartons are dated with that strange dating system that starts January 1st it goes for 365 days so you can tell how old they are .. eggs do save well in a variety of situations with the possible exception of freezing .
movie making ? I had a call for a rooster to be carried in a cage in Harvard square --- This is a long story but one you've not heard before I think ..
because of various problems with unions , movies very often filmed exteriors around Harvard square , but finished off the interior work in Toronto .. think Canadian border .. so I was to get this rooster ready to go to Toronto to finish up .. that being the case I had to get veterinarian health certificate so it could cross the border
now chickens and animals in general being somewhat fragile the movie company wanted two identical backup roasters .. not a problem so far .the problem came ..
when they wanted their choice of five different breeds of Roosters .. which they would decide on 2 minutes before they put the rooster in the cage and ran around Harvard square .. so if you're counting as you all should be I now have 15 roasters in the car all with their veterinary certificates .. as I crossed over the Mystic Tobin bridge at 4:00 AM .. Just to fill you in on why it cost so much to make a movie the day before we we're due to be in Harvard square it had snowed heavily ..
however when I got there with all my Roosters .. I noticed they had hired a snowmaking machine to cover up any snow that had any dirt in it ..
I think this was the day I considered starting service dog project and getting out of the movie business ..
so we finished that job and I left the three Roosters in the care of the wardrobe Department -- with enough food and things to get them to Canada and I came home
with twelve rroosters none of which I wanted .. but there are a lot of horse barns between Cambridge in Ipswich .. most of whom I knew very well .. so I drove through most of them on the way home and dropped off a rooster in their barn .... The last rooster I dropped in the Cemetery in topsfield .. because I knew they already had a group of roosters that people kept dropping there .
Moving on to the police and Roosters -- I had a call this morning at 4:00 AM -- I was up making monkey fists .. and the police said they had a call about the dogs barking .. so I quickly put on my explore Internet puppy Hill camera it was not a sound .. so I scanned back through the last hour .. and there had been 7 individual barks
From one dog before he turned around and went back in .. that apparently was enough for someone to call the police and complain .. when you have dogs there is an assumption but they are noisy .. this is not true with great Danes .. they certainly can be but they prefer to take a nap inside where they're comfortable and not stand out in the cold and bark .. or to rephrase that if they're outside barking something is wrong and I need to know it .. for that purpose last night there were two people here monitoring the barking along with lynne Who monitors our cameras overnight it gives me a report on who was outside and who barked .. I have months of this report
and the most notable noisemaker is of course the roosters--- Who starred in shortly after 2:00 AM ---because they heard the rumor that the early bird gets the worm and they like worms ... so when the police called I stuck my head out the window and couldn't hear a thing but of course being partially deaf that's not amazing -----but the person who is here overnight has perfectly normal hearing and she couldn't hear anything either .. because 150 feet away from that barking you can barely hear it because noise goes down with distance .. a scientific fact .. . when the danes come out to pee... it seems they bRK O9NCE AND SEE IF THERE ARE ANY OTHER NEIGHBORHOOD DOGS THAT WILL ANSWER THEM .. AND IF THERE are no answers they go back to bed.
One other Nearly related topic .. about prey drive and the fact that our dogs are not chasing the chickens .. I had occasion at one point to be in the kennels associated with the myopia hunt club .. where they have 30 or so foxhounds and their puppy kennels contained goats .. I was told the reason was they didn't want the Fox hounds chasing deer ..
so now you have one more piece of information which has no earthly use .
