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I hope my chick makes it to 2 weeks old. I wish I had a heat lamp.
I look at mongooses as voracoius predators- if they weren't they wouldn't last very long. my expensive pellet gun rated for 1000fps stopped functioning- I think becuse of the higher chamber pressure. I'd get the cheap 800 fps one now. I heard of people having mongoose as pets- I think you have to domesticate them from birth but who knows when they going revert to nature.
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quote:
Originally posted by tada
I hope my chick makes it to 2 weeks old. I wish I had a heat lamp.
we used a regular lamp without the shade for our 6 chicks. worked perfectly fine up here at 2400 ft. elevation.
"a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
w. james
"a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
w. james
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My mom is the expert- she said no you don't need heat lamp but I'm using the little night bulb. I dangled it in the big speghetti sauce tin can and wrapped a kerchief around it. saw the keiki huddling around it last night. i was expecting the worst- she- I hope it's a she was unsteady and breathing hard yesterday but looks like over the hump for now.
Chickens seem to succomb more to the cool rainy weather- at least my observation.
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We put a big gallon jar of hot water wrapped with a towel in the chick box at night and that keeps them warm enough. We are off grid so we don't run incandescent lights.
For the mongoose, we have dogs which run them off and occasionally catch a few. We trap them (an egg makes a good bait for the trap) and teach them to scuba dive in a big trashcan full of water. So far they haven't learned scuba diving. Relocating the mongoose to somewhere else is just giving someone else a problem so that doesn't seem right. We also have elevated coops and have a wire skirt around the legs so the mongoose has trouble climbing. I've seen them jump up into the coop, but only when there are small chicks cheeping up in the coop. Small chicks are apparently much tastier that mere eggs. Generally, when a hen hatches eggs, we will keep her and the chicks in a large dog crate for the first several weeks at least. That has really cut down on the chick mortality rate.
For folks who don't want to kill an animal, some sort of plan for what to do with excess roosters might be something to think about. Folks in our neighborhood drop off all unwanted roosters here and that solves the problem. You may want to find someone in your neighborhood willing to take in excess roosters or you will end up with a lot of noisy birds who annoy your hens. One rooster per ten hens is about the rooster to hen ratio I keep around. Any more than that and the hens have no feathers left on their backs and the roosters fight and injure themselves. Hmm, I suppose that is another answer for folks who don't want to kill animals. Keep too many roosters and they will do it themselves.
"I like yard sales," he said. "All true survivalists like yard sales."
Kurt Wilson
"I like yard sales," he said. "All true survivalists like yard sales."
Kurt Wilson
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I find that a golf ball makes good trap bait for mongoose. They think its an egg and enter the trap to check it out.
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