The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Robotic mother hen?

first round of chicks in 2012 go outside in the mini coop


The first round of chicks have out grown their blue Rubbermaid tub and graduated to the new mini coop.

Sometimes I wonder if a fake mother hen would make new born chicks feel more secure in the first few weeks when life is so dangerous and big.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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I know that they used sock puppet mothers to raise California Condor chicks- that way they would know what to do when they were set free and raised clutches of their own.

Ah, I do love a good puppet show....

Comment by Eric in Japan Sun Mar 11 17:47:09 2012
I think those puppets are to keep the condors from imprinting on the people. I don't really mind if our chicks imprint on us --- it's better than being so skittish when a huge person shows up in their personal space! But that seems to be breed specific --- our Sussex didn't seem to be scared of us, but that meant they were too tame for our homestead. So I guess I should value the scaredy-cat nature of our current batch of chicks.
Comment by anna Sun Mar 11 19:05:33 2012





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