[ORIGINAL VIDEO] Experimenting With Open Range Poultry Farming: First Time Manually Hatching an Egg
The past few weeks I have been testing waters with a (semi) free range poultry farm. The idea is simple: using fencing nets I have barricaded tightly around a 25m x 4m space, and built a 3-walled shed on one end of the enclosure. The space has some natural shades almost covering the range, which I think has done well enough to hide chicks from ravaging hawks.
Next phase of the project is figuring how to supplement their feed. I am researching for some formulas and would very soon get mixing, once I find something light on the pocket and able to be sourced locally. For now the birds are living on the organic domestic waste from the kitchen, and the succulent herbs that litter the space.
I still have on the itinerary partitioning their sleeping area to allow for multiple birds to pick spots and lay eggs concurrently, without interference from the others.
In all I am trying to keep the expenses on this very low, as I consider the whole process very experimental. I am yet to see anyone in my community attempt such controlled husbandry of this local breed of birds. Everyone else is big on the genetically modified layer and broiler breeds. So much so that I fear the local breeds may well be on their way to extinction.
This past weekend came with some exciting challenge. I found a partially hatched egg in the spot where a mother hen had incubated her eggs. This was the runt of the pack, I guess. Since the hen had already taken out the 8 hatched chicks two days earlier, I thought this one was either going to die from the cold or suffocation inside the half-cracked egg. My intuition was to save the day, which I tried.
First I called a friend who is an animal scientist and he advised I can go ahead with the "c-section". He warned though I would have to provide warmth for the chick since it will be hard to get mother hen to sit over it. And then I may have some work to do to integrate her into the fold as mother hen has an intuitive count of her stock. I felt like Dwayne Johnson in Skyscraper, but I was going to try.
The following video details this process. Not before a warning:
WARNING!!! The following video contains some somewhat graphic images. If you are like me who experiences a sudden drop in blood pressure at the sight of blood, I would advice you go ahead and watch it. I mean I sat through the editing of this, having to watch repeated loops of this not-too-gross stuff. Try it. Put it on the family TV. Watch it with your kids.
That was beautiful, wasn't it? Yeah, sad too.
The chick died when I got there the next morning. It was strong enough to join the other chicks and create a room for itself beneath mother-hen's warm feathers the evening before. At that point I thought we won the race to stay alive. I suppose after that it wasn't strong enough to move till it was comfortable. So it may have died from the weight of the hen, or from suffocation, or from sheer exhaustion. Poor chick.
If I could do anything differently, it would be to have the frail chick separated for longer, in a carton with a lantern and food. For maybe another couple days till it was visibly energetic. Hindsight is 20/20.
In the brief moments the chick shared with us, it offered me and my family a chance to be fascinated at nature. An hour or so after leaving the egg, it already knew the sound of the mother hen and responded to it with excitement. The reaction of the hen and the other chicks when they first saw the new member of the family was golden. Glad I somewhat got that on tape on the memory stick. What was even more beautiful was its struggle to survive, and keep up with the rest of the fold. Beautiful soul. I hope you find peace wherever you are.
Before this becomes an eulogy to a chick, I am going to end this post. I will appreciate any suggestions or sharing of experiences with this method, in comments below. Please upvote, share and follow if you find value in this. Like that this blog post is over.
Peace,
Ubokobong Akpan
With regards to additives in their food, one thing you will want to increase is the amount of calcium that they get. That leads to nice strong egg shells and prevents any potential issues down the line with eggs potentially breaking apart inside the hen.
I'd recommend two sources of calcium. The first one which might be hard to get hold of is crushed oyster shells. Second one is to take used egg shells, let them dry out for a few days and then crush them down into a powder/crumb. You can either add the powder to their food, or give them access to the crumb size bits on demand. I think some also add to water.
One thing i will say, and I know this is hard to do in some cases, but if you have a chick that is weak and cannot hatch from the egg themselves, it is often better to let them pass, especially if you have plans to breed more from your chicks when they grow. A chick that is weak is genetically likely to pass something on to their offspring, making a larger percentage of those weak as well. If you save the chick and then use it as a meat bird later on, then fair enough, but I would recommend against breeding with the weaker ones (mark them up with a dot on their head, not red in colour, until they are old enough to be ringed)
Quite often, the ones that cannot hatch will have lost humidity in the shell from the mother moving off with the other chicks. You can usually tell this is the case if you have to peel a sticky membrane off the chick's down feathers. It's beneficial to keep the general humidity and moisture levels up if you are doing this. I used to use a small spray bottle and mist them with water if i was trying to save them. The drier they get, the harder it is to get them out.
Pumpkin and pumpkin seeds are a great supplement. They are a natural chicken wormer and will keep their digestive tracts free of parasites which a lot will pick up on a natural diet
Maybe i should write a post on poultry husbandry. I think i could go on for hours about them.
Wow! Please write the post. I feel too you have a lot bottled up in there you have to let out; and I am sure it will be very very beneficial to experimenting farmers like myself. Thank you for the advice already. I am going to have to print this page out and get to work on them ASAP.
beautiful little video Akpan! Nice job with the editing. We have been thinking about getting a chicken coop ourselves.
Aww, beautiful post. Glad I resteemed for later read.
I know what you mean about sharing the fleeting moments with an unexpected guest. My husband (man in photo) loves the tawny frogmouth. It’s a nocturnal bird, that gets him excited whenever he sees one. The whole family must go out and witness this wonderous bird every time. One sat silently on our trailer under our carport, frozen like a statue. It was completely vulnerable to the cats. He worried about it all day, going out to check on it. We watched it barely move throughout the day, trying to offer it water, food, but it was unresponsive.
The next morning he came in really upset to share news that the bird had died. He had picked it up and apparently it was very light. So I guess it was just quietly dying in front of us. So very sad, but we were very engrossed with ‘nature’ during that time. We were able to get very close to observe it.
Anyway, good luck with your husbandry experiment with your local birds.
That is so beautiful to hear, that your husband has such soft spot for creatures so tiny they can't even repay our love for them. I just looked up "tawny frogmouth" and it looks adorable. Little wonder the love :)
As always, I am grateful for your thoughtful comment <3
This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account after manual review.
Very appreciated <3
I guess it's already too weak to do much without serious attention such as warmth given to it to survive. I like the video quality, which software and camera did you use?
Thanks for taking a look. Yeah, I agree too that extended care and attention would have saved the chick. For the editing software, I am getting my hands dirty gradually with good ole Adobe Premiere Pro CC '18. For the cameras, the cleaner shots were with a GoPro Hero 6, and the more smudgy ones were with an Infinix Zero 5. Both of these cameras (especially the GoPro) are actually able to do a lot. I just need to get to figure out how to get them work at best conditions.
The Go Pro is worth the money spent. The video is miles ahead, in terms of quality, with the usual often blurry production in most of our people's video (no offence meant :D) due to the mostly low resolution, easily affordable Chinese phone camera quality.
I think even more than the fact we don't use first grade brands of devices, a lot of that “blurry” also lies in people not understanding the basic tenets of taking pictures. On a well lit set, most any camera will produce useable pictures. Then there's the composition factor. But Africans are guilty of being stuck in their career niches, such that a doctor thinks it's a waste of his time to read history books.
Then... We digressed from the poor bird ;-)
You are correct, but with a good camera, even with the wrong camera and light position, it creates a better image. Though I've realised that many who take pictures that do not realise that it is all about the object's lightning, background, and how the camera position that makes all the difference. I've seen wonderful photos taken that poor lightning killed. I like to learn a lot of many other things not related to my career as it makes for a great conversation while hanging out with people from different background :) Also, you never can tell where it'd be useful.
FYI: The poor bird understands we like a good photograph when we see one :)
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STOPI've done free range chickens, let me know if you have any questions.
When talking about supplementing their feed, how many eggs you are getting and their size should be the best indicator of if they are getting enough nutrition.
The best thing about free range chickens (aside from the flavorful eggs) is that the more "range" they have the greater their ability to forage for bugs and feed themselves. They will be getting pletty of calcium from eating bugs if they are getting the chance: that with your kitchen scraps might be an adequate diet, but if they need more calories, cracked corn is the most typical dietary supplement. It looks like someone else already commented on the egg shell thickness and calcium.
The really only need for fencing is to deter predators, so you would be the one most aware of what your local predator situation is like. We had plenty of hawks where I kept my birds but because they were 100% free range, if hawks flew over my guinea fowl would raise the alarm and all the birds would run for cover under trees where they were safe. My free range birds were actually so big and tough from foraging all day for as much food as they want, that two of them got grabbed at by hawks when they were too slow for cover, and managed to get away, so I never lost a chicken to predators out of the about 30 that I kept. (guinea fowl, different story lost plenty of those)
my grandpa bought me a Bantam hen and a bantam rooster. they basically had the run of the yard... a very big area, but they always came home in the evening, I use to get these tiny little eggs, which were actually quite tasty, but you had to eat a dozen of them to make a meal! We let the hen hatch one egg, and the chick was a cute little bugger, but didn't survive... We never let her hatch any after that, too depressing.
Que triste que murió, yo salvé a un pollito que la gallina no espero a que saliera del cascarón, lo ayude, lo coloque en una cajita y le puse un bombillo, lo llamaba y cuando escuchaba mi voz, hacia el intento de levantarse hasta que aprendió a caminar, cuando me salia al trabajo lo dejaba en una cajita, me escondía a ver que hacia, solo se dormía en su trapito y cuando le hablaba, pillaba me seguía por toda la casa, estaba fuerte, un dia mi esposo lo colocó en el gallinero y cuando llegue del trabajo no estaba, se había perdido le dije que la gallina no lo quería y me enoje con el, salí a buscarlo lo llame y escuche su pio pio, estaba escondido en un huequito del gallinero y cuando me escucho salio corriendo, me dió tanta alegría haberlo encontrado. Fue un final feliz se llamaba pollito pio, mi pollito
¡Guauu! eso es tan dulce de escuchar Deseo que mi chica crezca fuerte como la tuya. Todavía extraño al pobre muchacho. Gracias por leer y comentar.
Disculpe mi español, tuve que usar el traductor de Google para hacer todo el 🙂
Hola, yo tambien uso el traductor, no te preocupes.