Blue Tamago

Those that follow my Instagram would have known that our beautiful Buffy had a short but fierce battle with cancer. He was sadly helped over the rainbow bridge on the 19th of May. It all started with his ongoing throat infection. A pussy plaque in this throat that was treated several times with antibiotics. When it came back again, he was switched to a different type and then reassessed. With no significant improvement, the vet decided to do a more thorough investigation as to why the infection would not go away. During the surgery, they found a lump underneath the infection, they took a biopsy and sent it away for pathology tests. It came back as cancer, that had metastasized, meaning that it had spread. It was diagnosed as squamous cell carcinoma, basically skin cancer, and the outcome was not good, especially if it had metastasized. The vet said it would eventually get into his lungs and effect his breathing. He was given a few months to live. We got 5 months. We could se...

Yesterday we made the decision to have a hormone implanted into Spot. This decision was made because she had very thin, wrinkly shelled eggs that no amount of calcium supplementation was able to fix. Spot ran the risk of having an egg break inside of her during laying, which could lead to a fatal infection.  I had heard of a hormone implant that would stop her from laying eggs, which would allow her body to recover (she has pretty much laid non stop for about 2.5 years). With a vet examining her eggs and confirming that she would benefit with the implant, we went ahead. I had posed this question on the Chicken Instagram community and received a lot of questions about it. So I thought I would share what I have learned and the vet's comments. What is Suprelorin? Suprelorin is the trade name given to the hormone implant. Proud to say that this implant is an Australian invention! Manufactured by Peptech Animal Health in NSW, the patent was granted in 2002. Looking through the p...

Another purple hued bakery item and yet again using purple carrots to give the vibrant purple colour. It's basically vegetables so it doesn't count as dessert right? 😃

So on some chicken forums I've heard that people are using Ivermectin "off-label" to treat their poultry for parasites (such as mites and lice) and they recommend an egg witholding period of 7 days. It's off-label as there have been very few studies looking at the metabolism of this drug through avians. In December last year, there has been one scientific study done on Ivermectin and poultry. So is there a clear answer to it's safety in poultry and more importantly, how long before you can eat the eggs?

How about adding some colour to your food and sneaking in a few veggies as well? This purple blush bread uses purple carrots for that perfect hue and paired with the soft, fluffy and sweet bread, it is perfect just on it's own or with a pat of butter.

There is this idea going around that egg yolks from bantam chickens are the same size as yolks from normal sized chickens (actually, someone on Instagram asked me to find out). I have to say, the first time we cracked our bantam's egg, we thought the yolk looked the same size as our normal laying hens egg. So just to prove this point, I did a bit of literature research. So is it true, bantam yolks are the same size as normal yolks?

Don't chicken silhouettes look awesome? And roosters with their distinctive tail make the images look amazing. I'll show you how you can make one of your own chicken using Photoshop (yes alas, I only know how through Photoshop) and a picture of your chicken.

"Pant pant. It's sooo hot!" We are sitting through this heatwave and waiting for it to pass with agonizing slowness. We've been sweltering through 4 days of over 40C with a final trump card from nature delivered to us today. Each time I look at the weather forecast, the top temperature for today has been hiked UP. It's currently going to have a top of 44C with a cool change predicted for late afternoon. We've pretty much been lying under the fan all day (we don't have A/C in the house) but for our chickens, we've hatched out new cooling strategies.

No, we didn't give the chicks away, we just moved them to a new location to help them integrate with the rest of the flock. The chicks were 4 weeks old when we decided to move them and I read that it was usually after 4 weeks that the mumma hen decides to wean them.

Even though our chickens have a secure run attached to their coop, we still lock them up into their coop at night for extra safety. Now if we didn't have a chicken door, we would have to get up, out of our cosy beds early in the morning to let them out into the run. If you don't, all you'll hear is them complaining from inside the coop (and the occasional scuffle). Cue automatic chicken door. This door can be programmed to open and close at set times, leaving us able to sleep in, or allowing us to go out at night! We bought our first automatic chicken door from Titan Incubators almost 3 years ago, and our second one about 1 year ago. I have to admit, the main reason why we bought this brand was price. Even with shipping from the UK, it was cheaper than anything available in Australia that has a controller AND a door kit on runners. We bought it off ebay from Titan incubators. The first one cost us $203.99 and the second $189.99. The price difference was due to th...

I'm on Instagram now! Follow me on...you guessed it! bluetamago You'll get to see more pics of the chickens and little chicks (they are growing up so fast!) Did you know that Buffy is really good with the chicks? He even feeds them from his beak. Such a good boy. I've got some reviews of chicken items in the making, so they will be coming up. Stay tuned and follow me :) Oh, and don't forget the chicken cuddles!

Pekins are notorious for becoming broody, so when Goldilocks decided to sit in the nest box, we gave her some eggs. We decided on Araucana eggs and 21 days later, we have 3 new little cheeping adorable bundles of fluff!

Today we sadly farewell Pippy.

Spring has hit Adelaide with a bang and it's been hot and dry. I've been meaning to insulate the roof of Penguin's coop for a while now, but have only been motivated by the sight of hot chickens with their wings out. The roof in Penguin's coop is made of sheet metal, meaning that when the sun hits it, and the sun shines on it during the hottest part of the day, the roof becomes so hot that you can't touch it. The result is that the coop heats up like an oven, making the ground hot, which retains the heat into the night. My plan was to place a barrier to prevent this radiant heat entering the coop, making it more enjoyable for the chickens, not just during the day, but also at night.

It was a nice hot weekend again and it was round 2 for a chicken bath. Again I had added pyrethrum to the bath at a 1:1000 dilution just to kill off any live bugs, plus some bubble bath to help the liquid penetrate through the feathers.

The sun is out, but the nights are still cold! Spring is here! It's the time of year where egg laying goes into overdrive and we're getting on average 5 eggs a day from our 9 hens. What else has been going on up here?

I bet not many of you can't boast that you gave chickens a bath on the weekend! I had, by far, the best answer to "what did you get up to this weekend?" at work today. Anyway, let's wind back a bit. It was a gloriously hot spring weekend and it was time for me to get on top of the poultry lice on my chickens. I've been regularly dusting them with poultry dust, but it wasn't having much of an effect. So when a hot weekend was forecast, it was time for a two pronged attack. Bathe the chickens to get rid of the lice and a spring clean of the coop.

Yeah, yeah, I know, a pretty horrific picture for our two ladies! (Plus I've stopped eating chicken now, can't stand the guilt when I see my little ones). Anyway, onto the point of this post...

Weyhey! Welcome to a new section. I'll be utilising my several years of higher education in bringing to you information on chickens, sourced from research articles. I never knew there was a journal of British Poultry Science! So why research articles and not books? Well, articles go through a peer review process before publication. Yes, I've felt the pain of submitting an article, only for it to be rejected, the pain of reviewers asking for more tests, more corrections and data. All requested by people who work in the field and try and improve the quality of the article.  I've contributed to book chapters, but the one's I have done are basically a review of the current published literature. I'm not so sure about stand alone books, does it just get reviewed by the editor? I mean, there are some books out there that just give bad information (anyone remember that paleo diet cookbook that got pulled from the shelves?) . Anyway, I'll talk about a topic I fi...

Yup the title says it all. These are the ultimate breakfast buns. Yummy tasty eggs from your girls encased in a sweet brioche like golden bun. You can make them the day before and warm them up the next morning, but I warn you, they don't last long out of the oven! The trick is to make firm scrambled eggs, with very little milk or cream. Alternatively, you could make an omelet square and wrap that in the dough. Speaking of the dough, this is a sweet dough that goes really well with savoury or sweet fillings. In fact, you would find this sort of dough is Asian bakeries. It is slightly sweet, fluffy and moist. I've finally got all the proportions right with this dough.