Our mom says that chickens are "opportunistic, omnivorous scavengers." This means that they'll eat just about anything they come across: bugs, leaves, mice, grass, other birds, snakes, fruits, vegetables, etc.
Let's name some things that they love to eat! Ours love bananas, cooked rice, tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelons, chicken (yes, they eat their own kind!), broccoli, carrots, celery, and chili! Now, let's name some things they don't like. Onions (they're poisonous to chickens), bell pepper, oranges, lemons, and limes. We likes to feed our chickens scraps from dinner (if there are any, because Nanners is a bit of a pig). One of their favorite treats are soldier flies! They are pretty much pure protein! They are wild insects that lay their eggs in grains. Grains make up most of what's in chicken feed. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat just about anything, except bones. At stores, there are treats sold called 'meal worms'. These are dried larvae that birds love! When we feed our chickens, the chickens go crazy! They will grab pieces of food and run, like big babies. They think that if they don't run, they will lose their food to another chicken. Babies do this, sometimes, when they want to play. They tell others they have food, but sometimes just have some bedding or something else. Then, everybody chases that chick. They instinctively know what is poisonous when they hatch. When the chickens roam the yard, they avoid everything that is poisonous to them and eat everything else. Although they won't eat anything poisonous, they will, sometimes, eat things that still harm them, such as broken glass. When a chicken eats something, it first goes into their crop. Here, it is held until it gets digested. From the crop, food moves to the gizzard. This is their version of a stomach. The gizzard is an organ inside a bird that grinds up food using small stones. They think that glass is a rock that is just shiny (and they like shiny things!). So, they eat the glass to get some new "rocks" in their gizzard. Glass is a human thing, so most animals don't understand it, nor realize how dangerous it can be. So, always be sure to have an adult clean up any broken glass to prevent animals from getting hurt.
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Just two brothers
Nanners & Mashers are brothers who just want to share their birds with the world. Archives
April 2016
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