utenzi

Normally when the weather warms up, egg production at the farmstead goes up. But this year that didn't seem to be the case. Now, sure, it could be because the weather is unusually warm for this part of the year. The chickens and other fowl might still be in Winter mode since this time of the year is normally still quite cool. But still, we thought that the chickens would be laying more than a few eggs a week now. And then a few days of stormy weather blew a lot of leaves out from under the front porch stairs and lo and behold.... there was a nest of eggs under there. Now I check for eggs under the stairs frequently because they like it under there and I find a few a week. But they're always out in the open like that overexposed one in the front of that first picture. With most of the leaves out of the way, a whole bunch of eggs were exposed to the eye so we used a rake to pull them out. As you can see here, there were 16 eggs in that nest plus the one that was out in front. Tha...

It might seem like an odd thing to be thinking about but a few days ago I had to decide if I could toss out some kitchen scraps to the chickens. Chickens love scraps so why not give them, you might ask. Well, it so happens that there was a lot of spicy heat in those scraps and I didn't want to injure their little mouth parts---or anything that comes after the mouth either. Chicken shit isn't all that nice to start with. You really don't want to make it worse. So that led to some biological research. Specifically into TRPV1, which happens to be the receptor whose main job is detection and regulation of body temperature, but which also is the capsaicin receptor. The full name, in case you're curious, is transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily V member 1. As it turns out, though dogs, mice, and humans have a strong reaction to capsaicin, other species---even though they also have the TRPV1 receptor---don't have the same response. And chickens are one of t...