Practical Backyard Chicken Biosecurity

...temperament of my hens and my desire to protect our garden from marauding chickens, I keep our hens in an enclosed run during the day. I rarely see any wild birds in the run, but there are some improvements I could make to keep wild birds out entirely. Obviously, if you free range your hens you can’t keep them away from wild birds, but it was suggested at the conference not to keep chickens near ponds or even small water features since wild ducks...

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Free Online Chicken Behavior Course

...reader James for this tip: Coursera is offering a 5 week online course on chicken behavior, taught by the staff of Scotland’s Rural College. For those of you who haven’t heard about Coursera, it’s an online platform offering free courses in a wide variety of subjects, taught by professors from genuine big name universities, via video. The classes may or may not also include homework and discussion groups, but these are optional, and required only...

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Saturday Linkages: Chicken Hot Dogs and Toilet Museums

...ed Getaway | Designs & Ideas on Dornob http://dornob.com/high-hanging-tea-house-offers-suspended-getaway/ … ??? South Korea’s toilet culture museum: http://boingboing.net/2012/12/03/south-koreas-toilet-museum.html … Chicken hotdogs and garters for boys who want to be manly: http://boingboing.net/2012/12/03/chicken-hotdogs-and-garters-fo.html … For these links and more, follow Root Simple on Twitter: Follow @rootsimple...

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Chicken Goes to Hollywood

...lson is currently in Los Angeles to share Tillie’s story with children and chicken aficionados of all ages. Since her chickens reside on the East Coast, Peckerella stepped in to play ambassador. ‘Pecky’ as she is often called, did a wonderful job and was very well behaved, allowing many children to pet her and sitting patiently during the book reading. Her next appearance will be at a reading of Tillie’s story at Chevalier’s books in Larchmont Vil...

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The Perfect Chicken Coop?

...to go in the coop to collect eggs. It has a roof over the run to keep your chickens dry. It’s the basic form I used for our coop with a few refinements–I ran hardware cloth under run to keep out burrowing predators. I also extended the run to keep the chickens from pecking at each other (the more room they have the better). To paraphrase Nassim Taleb for the second time in a week, if a given design has been around for at least a hundred years, the...

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