Elegant feather ornament tutorial

Since we're getting close to Christmas I thought I would bring you another feather ornament tutorial. If you're anything like me you probably have a vase or box of feathers that your chickens have dropped and you picked up. What better way to decorate for the holidays then to bring the chickens indoors with you in the form of feather ornaments?

I've already made feather filled ornaments...and it seems like everyone is writing about making these now. Who can blame them though? They sure do look nice on the Christmas tree! Speaking of trees, last year I wrote a tutorial on making feather trees! Those went over really well, especially with my cat! You'll have to click over to the post to read the cat vs feather story. Oh boy that was a dilemma!

I wanted to make something that can be used outside the Christmas tree this year. After all, we keep feathers to memorialize our favorite chickens, right? It's such a shame to have to put those away at the end of the holidays each year. I wanted to make a feather ornament that could be a year round decoration as well as an addition to the holiday decor.

How to float test eggs

All chicken keepers know that chickens like to hide eggs. Well, that's why we give them nest boxes, right? So they can hide away and feel safe while they lay their eggs. Sometimes they like to lay outside the nest boxes though and we don't always find the eggs right away. Ever found a hidden nest of eggs and wonder how long they've been there? There's a simple test to do to determine if the eggs are new or old.

The float test.

The egg float test is pretty simple and works well since eggs change as they age. A brand new egg has a certain amount of space in the air cell. As the egg ages the pores of the egg allow air to enter and the air cell gets larger. The larger the air cell the more buoyant the egg. In shorter terms, old eggs float.

Chickens that lay blue eggs

One of the best thing about raising your own chickens for egg is that you can pick and choose your chicken breeds so that you have multicolored eggs. Chicken eggs come in many colors the most common are blue, green, brown and white. Admittedly, most people are only familiar with white and brown eggs, which is probably why owning a blue egg laying chicken is such a novelty for the backyard chicken keeper.

There are several breeds that lay blue eggs and they are all readily available from hatcheries and private breeders alike. Just like brown eggs come in various shades though, so do blue eggs. While only a few breeds actually lay blue eggs, by cross breeding them with chickens from breeds that lay other eggs colors, you can get a chicken that lays an aqua, olive or even purple hued egg.

5 Things non chicken keepers believe

When I first got chicken there was a lot to learn! I didn't realize how bad the predator problem would be, didn't know how much they poop or even that blue eggs were a real thing. In fact, there were 11 things about chickens that I had to learn the hard way. That was more than 10 years ago though and since then I've seen and heard non chicken keepers say some rather odd chicken 'facts' that simply aren't true at all.

Of course it's impossible to know everything, so going on the assumption that people are just repeating things they've heard...I thought I should clean up some misinformation that's going around. I've come across 5 chicken myths quite frequently so these are the ones I'm going to set the record straight on today.

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.