This would be really funny and it wouldn't be overpowered at all due to the impracticality of pulling this off. The source of the lead that we suspect in our Melbourne back yard chooks is soil contamination from lead paint, car batteries, sump oil and leaded petrol, and building materials like nails and screws. A follow-up study found that urban dwellers need to look out for lead for more than just their chickens’ sake. Boston University College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Earth and Environment, 685 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215, USA. When Teresa McGowan and her husband first bought their Somerville, Massachusetts, home in 2004, one of the first things they did was test the soil in their yard for lead.

There’s nothing like the fresh eggs from your own hens, the more than 400,000 Australians who keep backyard chooks will tell you. If ingested, since the metal is so dense and not easily oxidized, it will remain in the chicken's gastrointestinal tract. With advice on feeding, hatching, foraging, and keeping pesky predators at bay, we’ll take you from beginner to pro in the flap of a feathered wing.Discover some particularly rare English chicken breeds with very unique feather arrangements, and then find some reputable breeders in your local area.

We used the USEPA's Integrated Exposure Uptake Biokinetic Model for Lead in Children (IEUBK) to assess the relative contribution of backyard egg consumption to aggregate BLL in children. Photo: Alonso NicholsThere’s even a longer history of public health agencies sounding the alarm about lead-based paint, which spurred a federal ban of it in new construction in 1978. Of course, if you have a large number of hens this would be a monumental task, but if you only have two or three birds it could be of benefit to all.

Anyone who has tried to medicate a hen knows they have a neck that can pull their head down into the chest – much like a turtle.

Add clean soil, mulch, or other clean cover material to existing chicken runs to help reduce chickens’ contact with and ingestion of contaminated soil. Lead poisoning can present in chickens in acute or chronic form, depending on the extent of exposure and the amount of lead ingested.The birds themselves are easy to love for being low-maintenance pets, and for providing all-natural pest control, free fertilizer, and fresh eggs.

Client health is an important consideration in cases of high blood lead levels in backyard urban chickens used for egg production. Photo: Alonso NicholsShe didn’t, however, decide to stop raising chickens—there are too many other benefits. They may however, while foraging, peck and ingest, nails and screws nonspecific radiodense rocks and non-heavy metal metallic objects.But this boom in popularity has also brought a surge of news stories fretting about the risks of raising food on contaminated city soils. In older homes close to city centres, contaminated soils can greatly increase people’s exposure to lead through eating eggs from backyard hens.