Does egg shape indicate chick sex?

Lately I've been seeing some information going around that claims that you can choose which gender chick you hatch by carefully selecting the shape of the eggs you incubate. According to this information, round eggs hatch pullets and more pointed or oval eggs hatch cockerels. It's an interesting concept but completely untrue.

First of all this didn't make sense at all to me because over the years I've always incubated oval shaped eggs. In the post How to store and handle hatching eggs I talked about how odd shaped eggs should not be hatched and that they don't get as good a hatch rate as your regular, well...egg shaped eggs. Except for a few experiments with pullet eggs, I always set oval shaped eggs. 

If the round egg myth was correct, I would have hatched an excess of cockerels on every hatch. That's not what happened.

Spiders in the chicken coop

If you have chickens for any length of time then I'm sure you've had spiders in your chicken coop by now! Not only do spiders like to eat the bugs that are attracted to rotting feed and chicken poop, but they're quite brilliant in where they place their webs. This makes it rather hard to get rid of spiders in the chicken coop. You can knock down the webs, but the spiders will just rebuild. The question is: are spiders in chicken coops a bad thing?

Not only do spiders eat the bugs flying around your chicken coop, but they are bugs. Chickens like bugs and yes, chickens will eat spiders. Spiders are smarter than we tend to think though and they will build their nests up out of the chickens reach. You'll rarely see a web right by a roost or near the feed. Spiders will build their webs right on lights or in front of ventilation holes. Pretty smart for them to catch the bugs where they're most likely to be.

Of course this means that when you walk into the chicken coop the webs are often hanging right in front of you which can be pretty unpleasant. So, should you knock down the spider webs in the chicken coop, or just leave them there? 

I do a little bit of both.

Treating pasty butt in chicks

Even though it's late in the season but one of my perma-broody Silkies just hatched another set of chicks. Unfortunately one of the chicks has pasty butt but that's ok because I realized I've never talked about how I treat pasty butt in chicks! It's actually super simple and usually only requires a few minutes of effort. Even though it doesn't look like much, pasty butt can kill a chick rather quickly.

Pasty butt is when poop sticks to a chicks normally fluffy bum area. It starts with one little bit sticking, but can build up till their vent is basically 'pasted' shut. When that happens the chick cannot poop at all. Not being able to poop can kill them because the poop inside their little system builds up and the toxins kill them. It mostly happens to very young chicks, usually less than 2 weeks old. Though it can happen in older chicks, it's not common.

Luckily treatment is as easy as clean the butt, oil it up so more poop can't stick and fix the issue that caused the problem in the first place. Sounds easy right? Lets get started.

Sudden death in chickens

Has one of your chickens ever just died? Like, there was nothing wrong earlier, she didn't seem sick and she didn't get hurt but there she is suddenly just...dead? It happens more often than you would think. Today I want to talk about the unexplained reasons why a hen or rooster might just drop dead. Sudden death in chickens is very upsetting because not only have you lost your pet chicken, but now you're worried about the rest of the flock. So let's try to figure out what happened.

You open up the coop in the morning and there's one chicken laying on the floor instead of perched on the roost. How did you not see this coming? You see, chickens are pretty low on the food chain. Because of this they get pretty good at hiding their illnesses. You often can't tell they're sick until it's too late. 

Today I want to go over a postmortem assessment of sorts to try and determine what actually happened. We are not going to cut into the chicken for a necropsy (I'll save that for another post) but this is how I would asses a birds appearance to determine her cause of death.

Identify and treat heat stress in chickens

Obviously in summer the temperatures get hot and we all get uncomfortably warm, especially outside animals like chickens. There is a big difference between hot and too hot though. Chickens can suffer heat stress just like people can, but unfortunately they can't come in from the heat and chill in the AC like we can! So it's super important to watch for signs of heat stress in your chickens, plus take preventative measures to keep them cool enough to avoid overheating in the first place!

What is heat stress in chickens? Just like in people, heat stress is the condition when your body cannot cool itself enough to maintain a healthy temperature. Heat stress is caused by high temperatures coupled with low air speed. Usually it's a ridiculously hot, still day but it can be caused by them being stuck in a direct sun location for an extended period of time on a warm day. 

I'm going to touch really briefly on preventing heat stress, since I've already talked about the 14 ways I help my chickens to stay cool in summer. Then lets get straight into identifying and treating heat stress in chickens!