Not a good idea to use the grill when chickens are under foot.

[gcvmom]

I made beef kabobs tonight on the grill. The birds were out, and whenever they see me, they come a running. I guess they think I'm gonna give them something interesting to eat. Which is weird, because I don't always have food. But I digress.

Coco, one of my black hens, must have liked what she smelled, because I turned my back to do something and she flew up onto the shelf on the side of the grill! Fortunately, I'd already taken the skewers off the plate that was resting there, but nevertheless, the language that flew out of my mouth at my fowl was pretty foul. easy child would not have been too happy with me if we'd had chicken for dinner!

 

[susiestar]

A close friend of mine has chickens. Her daughter dropped a piece of chicken off of the grill one day. One of their chickens grabbed it and started to eat it before she could pick it up. It totally grossed the girl out. I thought chickens mostly ate corn, but these chickens seemed to really love eating grilled chicken. They had to wrestle the meat away from the bird. The next time they went out to grill the chickens mobbed them around the grill. They had to start putting them all in their coop if they wanted to grill. Otherwise the birds tried to grab the meat.

Talk about strange - cannibal chickens! Seems like it would be the start of a horror movie or something.

 

[TerryJ2]

Omg! Lol.

 

[Shari]

Just FYI, I haven't even read this yet, and I am already laughing....

 

[gcvmom]

FWIW, Susie, chickens are omnivores. So yeah, just about anything is fair game to them Mine have killed and partially eaten mice that have wandered into the coop.

 

[GoingNorth]

Chickens, especially under the sort of stresses you find on factory farms, are also cannibalistic. They actually remove part of the end of the upper mandible ("debeaking") in order to prevent them from pecking the weakest to death and then eating them.

In nature, chickens eat bugs, seeds (NOT corn), and greens. They will scavenge dead animals as well. That's why they are so popular as backyard food producers (meat and eggs), they can survive quite nicely on kitchen scraps and what they can forage.

 

[Marguerite]

We've occasionally fed leftover chicken to our hens. difficult child 1 told us not to do it, since cannibalism in any animal can be risky health-wise (prion disease is more common within the same species).

One of our budgies who was very tame, used to ride around on my shoulder and one day while I was cutting up some food to cook, he wanted to try this and that. I would hold a bit of lettuce to him, or fruit. But when I was cutting up chicken, this little bird ran down my arm and tried to dive right in to the container of cold cooked chicken meat. He was determined to get it! I stopped him and copped an angry squawk when I put the lid on to stop him. This budgie wanted to eat cold chicken, more than anything else I had available that day.

Marg

 

[gcvmom]

Too funny, Marg!

 

[Shari]

Perhaps the budgie had been bullied in a previous life by a chicken...?

that's funny.

 

[Marcie Mac]

SO gives Yodi cooked egg yokes - absolutely makes my stomach turn as the bird starts purring like a cat and making this deep throated mmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmm sound - I gotta leave the room

Marcie

 

[Shari]

The chickens absolutely love to eat their broken eggs.... I'm with you Marcie... the thought of that is just....wrong.

 

[Marguerite]

I remember my mother feeding egg yolk to her red factor canary. You needed to keep the bird's carotene intake up, to keep its colour. And the instructions for breeding budgies is to give them a high protein diet, such as cooked egg. Shell and all, to give them a calcium boost.

Marg

 

[GoingNorth]

I've heard that one shouldn't feed eggshells to laying hens as it can encourage them to eat their own eggs. I don't know about that. I just know that most chickens need some sort of calcium supplement to produce healthy eggshells.

 

[Marguerite]

We fed eggshells to our chooks all the time and had no problems with eggs getting eaten, except for the extra large extra thin-shelled eggs that broke while being laid.

The trick with feeding them eggshells - we put them on an oven tray and when we've been baking, we use the residual heat to bake the shells dry. Then we crush them. We used to either put the crushed shells in the feed hopper, or scattered over the chookhouse floor. What they don't eat composts in and sweetens the compost that we et from the chookhouse. Win-win.

Marg