Which poultry forums or sites do you use?

[SundaeGirl]

Obviously, MN Chicken Keepers topic has no equal.

But, are there other forums anyone uses?

BackYardChickens.com was one of the first (I think I started using it in 2002/3, although I'm no longer a contributer) but is rather US-focused. Whilst chicken anatomy doesn't change, you often have to translate things like brand names of medication. It also has a tendency towards redneck GOP-supporting, home educating fundamentalist backwoodsmen, something that I think has become more obvious since I was last an active member (2008/9 or so)

PracticalPoultry.com is also useful - it's a UK based forum where all manner of questions can be answered, often by professional breeders / people who have been keeping chickens far longer than the average MN'er.

However, I've found books to be some of the most useful resources I own in chicken keeping. Gail Damerow's Chicken Health Handbook is invaluable for diagnosis & treatment (diagnosis before you take it to the vet is usually an advantage, if you have some idea what you're doing), and for the total novice, Katie Thear's Starting with Chickens provides a useful base to work from.

I really don't want people to take this in the wrong way, but MN Chicken Keepers tends to attract people who have only been keeping chickens for a relatively short period of time, usually as pets, and have limited experience. Whilst it is useful for some things, for the more technical / uncommon bits of chicken husbandry, I have seen some nonsense peddled (the very reason why I started posting on here) and so in those cases it can be better to use other resources in conjunction with MN.

I post on my own breed forum for silkie related advice but I really like MN Chicken Keepers because of the community "feel" about it, I don't think that you get that with others. I don't agree with Boomting, most of the advice here is OK, particularly when people want advice about types of housing and breeds. To be fair if you have a complicated query about a particular bird, you're not going to be able to get great advice from a forum anywhere.

It would be sad if people couldn't post their experiences, whether they,ve been keeping chicken for 20 mins or 20 years.

Thanks, boomting. Any views on the Omlet forums?

One of the great things about MN is how quickly people usually respond (true of all topics) and I wondered ifOmlet might' be similar.

X-post Beehiving, thanks for reply. I'm hoping to find someone to chatter to about Polands and Appenzellers.

There doesn't seem to be a huge overlap between the British poultry fancying world and Internet Forum users, it does seem to happen quite off screen, unless I'm missin something. (Which I probably am!)

I used omlet a lot when I first started
There are some really knowledgeable people on there but they are also some annoying fuckers.
I occasionally look in but can't abide the chat so just use it for info

I think that's an issue with the fancying world Sundae, it's still mainly little old blokes in sheds, not that I have anything against a little old blokes in sheds but they're not very techy

SundaeGirl Omlet is a company that is aimed very much at people who just want to keep a couple of chickens in their back garden, and have no idea where to start. Nothing wrong in that, and they were simply in the right place at the right time, when small-scale urban chicken keeping started to take off (and to some extent they caused the take off) in 2005/6 or so. I think at that point the forum was primarily filled with inexperienced urbanites, and I never really used it, as I'm not an eglu owner, and I was happily using other forums at that point. However, having had a look at the forum, it seems as though the inexperienced urbanites have since become more experienced, although they don't quite share my slightly more no-nonsense they're-not-dogs-they're-chickens-so-treat-them-as-such attitude towards pet chickens (the thread about whether or not a dead hen should be shown to the others so that they know she's dead, for instance )

I have found the community feel elsewhere (BackyardChickens in particular, although I never really got my teeth in the PP forum) - it's just that it's often not immediately obvious to a new forum user. BYC even has meet-ups for its members. The members on there can be surprisingly useful, and I know that on several occasions (either through specific diagnosis, or through me learning things that preventing problems later on) the users there have saved my hen's lives / expense / faff.

I think you're probably right that the old-school (yes, often old men - I know I've come across a few, erm, characters when buying hens - such as the one who told me, proud as punch, that they even had running water now - no electricity, mind!!) fanciers / breeders can tend to be a little technophobic. In my experience, they usually only take to the internet when they have birds to sell! However, people who keep them for pleasure / small scale meat / egg production are more likely to take to the internet, and can often be just as knowledgeable, and less likely to recommend medicines / insecticides that were banned 10 years previously for being carcinogenic (or wringing their neck, lest they spread disease, as the response to any sick hen!).

I've kept chickens as pets for 5 years and I like the Omlet forum.

The Down The Lane forum (lovely people) and The Poultry Garden Forum (loads of medical and husbandry advice)

chat.allotment.org.uk/index.php?board=3.0

The allotment org site^ is great - they are really knowledgeable but tolerate the daft newbie well ime