Two of the youngest quail got out of their pen. So, it was time to remove the brooder. While they were still feathering out, I had the infrared border in their pen to keep them from getting too cold. They have been fully-feathered for some time, now, but they like having cover and removing […]
We recently had a warm spell and, now, the floor of the coop is in need of fresh shavings. Are those things merely consecutive, or is there some causality? Hmm. If it has been cold outside and then warms up, soon after, the coop floor gets squishy. I use a hoe to pull the wettest
When I went to do chores, I noticed that some snow had collected at the intake end of the air pipe. If snow gets pulled into the air pipe, it will melt when it gets to the warmer part and water could collect. If it were only a little snow, it wouldn’t matter because the
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One of the Pearl White Leghorn hens died. A quick examination revealed an egg stuck in her vent. For lack of any other evidence, I have ruled the cause of death to be “complications from becoming egg-bound.” That hen had particularly messy feathers on her backside for a couple of weeks before she died.
After I added the last wood shavings to the biomeiler, I began the activation process. According to the thermocouples, the pile has been inactive since it was assembled. No part of the pile measures hotter than 32 F. That was partly strategic. I wanted to begin with a non-composting pile so I can rule out
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One of my teammates started a print of the first version of the frame for the inventory system device. The printer ran overnight and I picked up the model this afternoon. The top part of the frame is the spool holder. It carries the RFID board to read the tag on the spool. The bottom
Finishing the crust and covering the insulating the top of the biomeiler was going to require more shavings than I had in the storage bin. So, I got a load of shavings on Saturday and added them to the biomeiler on Sunday, after I got home from church. It was good that I got the
Biomeiler Crust Complete Read More »
The circuit and code that allows the Raspberry Pi to control an RFID reader/writer is now working. I had to solder leads onto the reader/writer board, but that was the hardest part of building the circuit. It has been some time since I did any electronics-type soldering. Having older eyes makes it a little
In order to move the cots to the coop, I first needed to empty at least one of the quail pens. There was no point in dividing up the job so I harvested all the adult quail at once. Three quail don’t amount to much meat, but it takes little effort to clean them. It
The Last Quail Harvest Read More »
Quail are not intelligent birds. That has always been clear. However, one of the cots just distinguished itself to win a Darwin Award. Last night, after feeding the cots, I counted heads and one was missing. I looked all around the basement, thinking it had somehow gotten out of the pen. Every few hours, I