Blue Tamago

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...

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?

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?

Today we sadly farewell Pippy.

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.

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...