1/16/2004: Baby elephant mud bath
 

http://cellar.org/2004/elephantmudbath.jpg

Happy Friday! We have a lot of new visitors over the last few months. Long time IotD readers know that IotD features happy animal shots every Friday, but I rarely outright mention the practice and so... if you didn't know before, now you know.

These two beautifully contented elephant babies are in a wildlife trust nursery in Nairobi. This location raises such orphaned baby elephants until they are ready to released back into the wild.

I keep forgetting to mention that glassjaw pointed to MSNBC's yearly review of their IotWEEK:

http://www.msnbc.com//modules/yip03/slideshow.asp

Soem of these have been IotDs here as well; in any case, it's probably the best gallery of yearly images around.

Well, if we knew what year it was here, we'd give them a run.

Arghhh... You can't copy and past the pics... damn flash.....

but my favorite one is definitely the pig... haha.. that's a perfect Friday image!


:D

Ok.. I got super-annoyed that I couldn't find a way to bypass the flash stuff, and couldn't find the pic anywhere else via google, or the reporters newspaper website.. ....

So I did a prtscrn, and saved it via there.... So anyways.. here's the piggy.. ;)

I must be hungry...

I saw that picture and I thought..


WOW! That pig looks delicious!

Is it my imagination or is the Rhode Island red (seriously is that STILL a state) looking for her pal in that gaping maw?

Ok Griff, how did you know what breed of chicken that was?

That was a damn fine photo/musical montage. There are some absolutely first rate pics in there. I voted for the church, the illuminated cross and the thunderstorm as my fave.

I hesitate to mention this with quzah lurking but yes we have enslaved several breeds of chicken here. They are shamelessly exploited for their eggs and their young are eaten.

Oh, you upitty food chain climber, you.:D

What are the negatives to chicken ownership? Are they mean? Do they smell bad? Tear up the grass? Can you have just one chicken or are they happier with a friend or 2?

I really like chickens. They are soothing to watch and listen to. I think its good for the kids to be familiar with the compressed life cycle of chickens since they can extrapolate a lot more information from watching them than you'd expect. They can be tough on a yard, we've had them here from the time we first established our "lawn" so they are constantly tearing up weaker sections.

The only trouble with meaness that we've had is when roosters get close to three years old. If you don't interact with the roosters at all they seem to behave well for about 2 1/2 years. The hens of most breeds like to be held and petted. We have dominiques which are great foragers and smart about hawks something thats important since we let them range free during the day. Domi roosters are gorgeous critters. We also have aracunas which lay oddly colored eggs like blues and greens. They are a much more nervous breed but come in all kinds of crazy colors. Our lakenvelder chickens, I'd call a failure since the roosters are noisy and the hens are skinny and skittish. The Rhode Island Reds are good layers and pretty smart birds. We've had a few others with varying results.

There are a number of bantam breeds which make nice pets. I've never kept a single chicken so I don't know how they respond to isolation. They seem to enjoy flocking up and the hens seem more content with a couple roosters in the flock.

Thank you. I wonder if Ljim would let me have a couple? He was pretty adamant about the damn alpacas.... I bet chickens are more reasonably priced though.

chickens
 

We too had chickens at one point. My mom liked them and so from the time I was 16 till just recently my mom had them around. We built them a pen about 8 ft. by 8 ft. and then would also allow them to roam the back yard. They stayed in the pen at night, on rainy days, and days we weren't going to be home. We never ate them and in fact I hate eggs and my mom is allergic to them so we rarely used the eggs. They were mostly there as pets as my mom liked to go feed them and watch them scratch and peck around the yard. We had the bantam varieties (Cochin and silver sebrights) and a few Araucanas for the green/blue eggs. Like Griff we found the hens to be very good natured and the roosters to be a little mean at times. If you live in a real urban area I don't recommend roosters as they will crow at 4 AM (and sometimes earlier) and it will bug your neighbors.

Here are two sites that have some info on chickens. The first is the American Poultry Association's article on having chickens in an urban setting. You have to scroll down a bit to get to the article. The second site has photos of different chicken breeds. Its not a complete list as they don't have any photos of breeds that only exist as the bantam (small) breeds. But still its nice to look at the photos.

Here is a link to a hatchery that has a bunch of photos as well, plus you can order day old chicks from them.

Prob. more chicken info then any of you wanted to know. Those are just site I found with a quick google search, so there may be better stuff out there.