Nest boxes, hidey-holes, dust baths, learn how to make quail “furniture” with Kelly Bohling. Photos by author. In my years of keeping Japanese quail, I discovered that these birds always enjoy two pieces of “quail furniture”: a shelter to hide in, and a good dust bath! I also learned that whatever quail spend a lot of […]

How does a chicken get clean? By getting dirty! -Advertisement-  A Natural Instinct Flinging around dirt to get clean seems counterintuitive, but Mother Nature knows what She’s doing.  Dust bathing is an instinctive activity for many animals, including some mammals and many types of birds like sparrows, ostriches, and most game birds.  Dust bathing is […]

This coming June will be 2 years since starting my first flock of chicken(s) here on 25 Acres. Even though there has been a slow down to the number of “firsts” I’m experiencing, it still doesn’t make it any less shocking when weird things happen. Recently, I started supplementing the chicken dust bathing area with […]

Dust baths are important for maintaining a healthy, happy flock. But what do you do when the ground is frozen or covered in snow? Make an all-weather dust bath for your chickens! We live in a part of the Western US that experiences cold winters but rarely gets a lot of snow. Last year, though, […]

by Liz Hessen of For the Love of Chicken Poop -A collection of random information I thought was interesting. Chickens have a third eyelid. Their upper and lower eyelids move freely, like ours, except their lower lid moves a little more freely. The third eyelid lays between the other two lids and the eye. It […]

By Jennifer Sartell A friend of mine recently asked me why her beautiful white Cochin bantam was turning yellow. She admitted that the spring freezing and thawing has done a muddy number on her coop and run, but that it seemed like the problem was something other than a “dirty” issue. Evidently, she read my […]