The Winds of Change...

Well, the little chick-a-dees grew up so fast and a whole lot has happened!

Let's see, we had 6 cockerels and 3 pullets. Once we could, we gave 2 of the roosters to a friend of ours. One got eaten by a bobcat and the other is doing well over their backyard flock. We then had 4 roosters. Well, 5 if you count General Cotton. He finally had to be taken out after attacking me and dd several times. Once those chicks were born, he was fiercely protecting them. We respected that, but couldn't tolerate it. Poor guy. He really was a good rooster - to the hens anyway.

So, our other 4 roosters... let's see. There was that funny looking character, a salmon faverolle cockerel. Check him out. He went through a really awkward stage. Looked like he was wearing bloomers. Believe it or not, he eventually became a gorgeous rooster, but was at the bottom of the pecking order. He was always running scared and screeching this high pitched scream. We called him Screech. When they were all about 5 months old, we came out and found him dead one morning. We don't know why. This happens sometimes. Maybe the other chickens kept him from water and he dehydrated. The big roosters really picked on him. Poor guy.

This is our Ameraucana cockerel who loved to roost under mama chicken. He grew into the most beautiful rooster we have every laid eyes on. I don't think I ever got a decent picture of him, though. Once he got bigger and started getting his beautiful color, we started calling him Little Jerry Seinfeld.






Let me see what pics I can find of him. Well, here is a really crappy pic of him. He is still a juvenile rooster, here and not nearly as pretty as he eventually got, but you can see his pretty colors.










We had other pretty roosters, too. General Mustard was the biggest chick and also the biggest rooster. He was just huge!! There was another one of the same kind. We called him Optimus Roo. The two of them were really aggressive with the hens and with the other two roosters. We eventually decided to butcher General Mustard. He was just too aggressive and, well, they are a great table bird. Waste not.

Here is the big guy.


We decided to keep Optimus Roo and Little Jerry Seinfeld around until we could get some of the fertile eggs from their ladies. We planned to hatch some Ameraucanas and some more Marans and then get rid of Optimus and keep Little Jerry.

Then one night, the kids left the gate to the chicken yard open. The next morning, Optimus was gone. Only a bobcat could have been the culprit. A sly, quiet predator that takes only what he eats. One of the hens was gashed, but fine. I know he put up a fight and gave his life for his ladies as any good rooster will.

We had already had one possible bobcat attack. Our best layer, Speckles - the white hen, had wandered over next door and was eaten by something. We suspect a bob cat rather than the dog next door who would have taken it into their house to show it off.

Unfortunately, shortly after his untimely demise, the Marans hen stopped laying. This happens when they start to molt, or when the days become shorter than 14 hours. So, no fertile eggs, for shortly after she stopped laying, they all did.

Then, one cold, sad morning in January... I went out with my cup of coffee to discover feathers all over the yard. I looked over at the chicken yard. The gate was closed! What happened?? Upon investigation, I discovered that a pack of coyotes had come in the night and dug a hole under the chicken fence and had taken most of our flock. Our beautiful Little Jerry Seinfeld, our sweet Henrietta who laid the green eggs and loved to be held by dd (pictured), our funny, curious Cinnamon, our only little Marans pullet. They took 5 chickens. We had only 4 hens left.

2 of the hens we had left were the two we didn't even like. They were mother and daughter and they were just mean, unfriendly birds. So we have sold them. Now we are down to our sweet Penny, our Buff Orpington - who laid our first egg and a hatched all those babies, and Fiona, our funny Speckled Sussex. Now we are starting over...

Adding New Chickens to Our Flock

Oh, so much has happened. I am not that good at keeping up with my blog. Just need to work on carving out the time...

We have some new chickens!! Here is the story...We have a hen named Penny. You remember Penny. She laid the "first egg". She is a Buff Orpington. These hens are known for their "broodiness" or their desire to "set eggs" and hatch chicks. This trait has been "bread out" of many breeds as it is not a desirable trait in chickens needed for laying. A broody hen does not lay. She sets.

So, Penny decided to "go broody". She would sit in her nesting box on her egg and screech at anyone who disturbed her. The kids found this hilarious as they could get a screech out of her each and every time they opened the lid to the nesting box.

Well, I had been looking at a breed of chicken that I liked. It is called a Cuckoo Marans. These beautiful chickens lay a very dark brown egg. Like chocolate brown. I thought this would be a fun kind of hen to have, so I contemplated ordering some "hatching eggs" from a breeder.

Before we could do this, we needed to make sure that Penny was serious about hatching eggs. I had heard that first time broodies would leave their post halfway through the process. That wouldn't be good. So, I gave her some of our own eggs from the other hens. Keep in mind that all my eggs are fertile. We do have a rooster and he takes his job very seriously. So I put about 8 eggs under her to see if having a whole "clutch" of eggs would kick her into high gear.

Sure enough, she would not leave that nesting box once she felt that she had a good clutch.

Now, hens are funny characters. They like to lay their egg in the same box that other hens have. Sometimes they make up their minds to lay in a box that another hen is still occupying. Here is an example. Here you see Speckles (the white hen) in a nesting box. Then Fiona (the brown hen) decided she wanted to lay her egg in that box, too. Even though there were 7 empty, clean nesting boxes available, this was the one she liked. She didn't care that Speckles was in there. I watched this silliness and saw her lay the egg while sitting on top of Speckles - who stubbornly stayed put. You can see the egg in the bottom left of the picture.

Well, when Penny started to "set" her clutch of eggs, the others still wanted to lay in her box. Unfortunately, Penny is ranked at the bottom of the "pecking order", so they would either kick her out or sit right on top of her and lay eggs to add to her clutch. When we moved her to her own apartment, she had 18 eggs in her clutch.

I wonder if birds in the wild do this. Do they appoint one or two hens to do the brooding and all contribute to the clutch? That would make a lot of sense. A flock certainly couldn't afford to have all the females brooding at once. That would leave them too vulnerable. Hmm.

Anyway, we moved Penny and 14 of her eggs to her own apartment (a large wire dog crate) to hatch her eggs in peace. Here she is happily keeping her eggs warm. She usually flattened herself to a "Penny pancake" as we called her, but here, she is all puffed up in defense of her space.

Hens keep their eggs warmed to a temperature of between 100* and 101*. In colder climates, they will shed some of their breast feathers to line the nest and bring the eggs closer to their warm skin. In our weather that wasn't necessary and she didn't shed any feathers.

So, remember, these are just my own hens' eggs. I hadn't ordered my prized Cuckoo Marans eggs yet. But once I saw that Penny was serious, I did order them. They came in about 3 days and on Friday evening February 13th, we went out and pulled Penny off her nest. I took out the 14 eggs she had been incubating and replaced them with 12 Golden Cuckoo Marans eggs, 2 Ameraucana eggs, and 2 of my own hens' eggs. So, 16 eggs in all. At the same time, my friend Rene' and her husband were there to take the eggs she had been incubating and put them in a homemade incubator to finish the process. I broke one, so they took 13 and got 10 chicks!!!

Chicken eggs take 20-21 days to incubate. So on day 15, we wanted to see how they were doing. A process called "candling" would tell us. So we went out in the dark of night to candle the eggs. It was difficult and really hard to take pictures of. I didn't get any good still pics, but got this video. We did find 4 eggs that had not developed or had died and we took those out. 12 left.


Once the big day arrived, we went out in the morning before the kids had to go to P.E. class. It was Friday, March 6th, right on schedule. When we went out, there was a little chick!!! It was the Ameraucana chick. Yay!!
The next to hatch was a Golden Cuckoo Marans. We could tell by its coloring that it was a cockerel (boy). Some breeds are like that. You can tell by the coloring whether it is a cockerel or a pullet (girl). We named him General Mustard. Our other rooster is General Cotton. We like those names.
Here he is on the left. Note the size of his feet and head. He is still the biggest of all the chicks.

We ended up with 6 Marans, 1 Ameraucana, 1 chick from my own stock, an Amber Star, and one surprise! The breeder who sent the eggs also raises Salmon Faverolles. They are beautiful birds, but I didn't order any. However she has one that lays a darker egg than most faverolles and the egg got into my Marans eggs. So we have a Faverolle surprise! Now these are funny little chicks. They have fluffy puffy cheeks and they are yellow with feathers running all the way down their legs to their extra toe!! They have a fifth toe. They look like prehistoric creatures. Very cute. Here is a pic of him as a little guy. The black feathers coming in on his wing indicates that this is another cockerel. Bummer! You will have to read my next post to see how ugly he gets. They go through a particularly awkward stage. Here he is. He doesn't have a name. We haven't named most of them.
So we ended up with a total of 9 chicks from the 12 eggs that were left after candling. The sad part is that at least 5 and possibly 6 of the 9 are cockerels. Only 3 pullets for sure. We will be having to make some decisions about what to do with all the extra roosters. I guess the best thing to do is to raise them and then process them for eating. Marans are great meat birds. Here are some more great pics of the momma hen with her babies. She has been a great mother! Also, I included a video of one of the babies hatching which was so wonderful for us to watch!!



Dust Bathing with Momma hen.















Get off of me!

His days are numbered

Well. I think it is time. The following is information for those interested, but more importantly is my self talk so that I may see that it is, indeed, time to invite the poor chap to dinner.

Up until the other day, it was just a quick flog of the back of a leg and off he ran. Like a coward's attack. He had done this to me a few times, to my husband and then to my young daughter. We started talking about doing him in, but I guess our hearts weren't really in it because he was still around to attack me the other day.

Ever since Penny hatched the chicks, he has been getting progressively worse. He is definitely protecting them. It is when I approach them that he comes at me. I understand and I appreciate his efforts. He is a good protector of his little flock. Honestly, though, this has never been a really great family rooster. This rooster was hand raised, but even as a tiny chick, was always flighty, and avoided human contact. He has NEVER been a lovable chicken. He has always been impossible to catch.

Many folks who have chickens have told me that they have wonderful friendly, sweet roosters. So, it seems that they are not all like this bird. Also, we have a hen of the same breed who is just nasty. She bites! The kids would love to get rid of her, but she lays a LOT of eggs. If she wasn't such a great layer, I would gladly give her away. Maybe when the babies start laying...

Our backyard is a sanctuary where the chickens add to the tranquility. Visitors love to come out to visit our chickens and enjoy "nature's Prozac" with us. Kids love to feed treats to and hold our chickens. The rooster has added to that with his crowing. He has a fairly quiet crow and we have grown to love the sound.

Lately, I have been more and more afraid of that rooster. I have taken to carrying a small rake around with me when I go out. I often fend him off with it, but the other day, he caught me without it...

I had gone out to put them all back in the coop and carried a metal steaming pan in which I had kitchen scraps to lure them into the coop. I tossed the scraps in and started my call, "chick, chick, chick, chick" and here he came. He came close and started quietly pecking and clucking nervously. This behavior always precedes an attack. I prepared myself with the metal pan in my hand. Sure enough, he came at me. As he lunged, I smacked him with the pan and away he rolled. He jumped up and came at me again. I wolluped him again and again and again with the metal pan. Each time, he continued to come at me.

I was unable to get away from him and unable to get out of this struggle that I found myself in. I wanted to call for help, but the only people that were home were my two kids. I certainly didn't want to call them into this situation. I was hating this rooster at this point. The struggle went on for several minutes. I didn't know how I was going to get out of it. I did know that if one of my blows knocked him down for good, I was okay with that. Eventually I was able to put a bush between me and him, he came around the bush at me. Then I moved to another bush. Eventually, my distance from the babies satisfied him (though that was not what I was going for) and he backed off. At this point I was late getting off to where I was going, so I just left. I was shaken up and angry!

Now I understand cock fighting. This guy was in it to the death if he had to be. I was whacking him with a metal pan!!! The foolish bird!

The next morning, I let the chickens out. I was sitting here in my family room where I can look out over my lovely back yard. I was noticing that the chickens were up on my patio. They are not allowed up there, and I usually go out and shoo them off gently when they come up. Now, I was afraid to. This was the moment that I realized he has to go. My tranquil sanctuary has been turned into a yard of harassment. I didn't want to go out there! That bird is messing with my sanity. He is a menace.

While I respect his determination and appreciate his protection of the flock, I don't think it is worth it to keep him. I have 5 more little roosters (7 weeks old) and perhaps there will be a sweet roo that will grow from that bunch. I had really wanted to see one of them take him out of power but I don't think I have the patience to wait for that. The kids and I started raising chickens for fun. General Cotton, as he is called, is spoiling the fun. That, alone, is reason enough to rid our flock of him. We just don't need or want the headache.

We don't have the time or inclination to "rehabilitate" what amounts to a wild animal. I don't believe such a thing can really be done. The advice I have read about rehabilitating an unruly rooster indicate that it would need to be done again and again. I have children. I'd be a fool. So, have I convinced myself???

Easter Egg New Year!

All of our hens are officially laying now. Yay!!! We now have 8 hens-a-laying, and a Rooster. The last hen finally laid her first egg on January 1!
Little Henrietta is our littlest hen. She is also the sweetest. Our daughter can hold her just like a baby in arms. She just totally relaxes and loves to be cuddled. This may sound crazy to some, but chickens are really soft! They are curious and funny looking and beautiful. Henrietta is an Ameracauna, so she has puffy cheeks. So cute. And this coming from a woman who does not like birds!!
When Henrietta was a little chick, about 1 week old, she nearly died. I nursed her back to health with a medicine dropper and sugar water. She made it and has always trusted us more than any of the other chickens. We call her the baby.
We have 2 Ameracaunas, Hazel and Henrietta. This breed is supposed to lay a greenish blue egg. However, when Hazel started laying, she laid a pearly cream colored egg. We were a little disappointed, so we were hoping that Henrietta would come through for us.
Sure enough, she lays the most beautiful eggs!! Here is her first egg!!!

We get a nice variety of egg colors and shapes. We can tell which eggs came from which hen based on color and shape.

We are charting our eggs. Each egg is weighed and charted for each bird and we note what time of day (am, noon, or pm) it was laid. We are learning about averaging the size egg a hen lays, graphing the size changes over time, and following each hen's laying pattern. We are learning so much!!!
Since we have a rooster, we know that many of our eggs are fertile (yes, you can eat fertile eggs) Here is a page about how to tell if an egg is fertile - very interesting, and with pictures. Fertile vs. INfertile egg

Two Hens Gone

Well, it happened yesterday.

It was a beautiful day following lots of rain. The chickens were happy to get out of the coop as they had been kept in during the rainy days. We keep them in for two reasons. One is that when it rains, they want to get out of it, which usually means getting on the patio and snuggling up on my patio furniture! Ugh!
The other is that when it rains, coyotes run everywhere. Rain floods their usual hiding places, dens, and trails. They get confused and just roam. On rainy days in the desert, you can see coyotes at shopping malls, at the gas station, in your front yard, on all the roads and wandering around school playgrounds. This puts the chickens in more danger than usual, so I prefer to just keep them off the patio and out of harm's way.
So, as I said, they were glad to get out on such a sunny day. The earth worms had been flooded up from the ground and were providing a tasty treat for the chickens. I appreciated them cleaning up those nasty worms.
It was about 1:30 in the afternoon. Greg was helping my dad on his boat in the front yard, next door. I had just gone to the backyard next door to visit with my mom and their new puppy. The kids were in the family room playing wii. The dog was inside with the kids, and the chickens were roaming the yard as usual.
Mom and I heard a chicken squawk and wondered what it was. Then we heard it again and saw a chicken flapping above the 6 foot fence. We ran over and saw 3 chickens outside the fence. We figured that they were squawking because they were trying to get back in. Without looking into the yard (why didn't I just look into the yard?!?) we started herding the chickens around the front of the house to the other side where I assumed they had come from.
This took several minutes and when we got to the other gate, the chickens refused to go in. I opened the gate to see chickens running and a coyote in my yard!! I started yelling and running, and mom did, too. Greg came running. Mom saw the coyote jump my 6 foot fence and then had to chase him away as he didn't want to leave. I wish she had had a gun.
We accounted for each chicken. 9 were okay, one lay mortally wounded in the yard and another struggled to walk, falling over, laboring to breathe. They were Henny, our big ol' Buff Orpington, and Flare, a beautiful Speckled Sussex. Both were great layers. Henny laid huge eggs. She was a great character, and Flare was the chicken that Nathan named when we brought them home as chicks. We were all devastated, realizing what we had to do.
One of the important lessons in having chickens that I wanted my children to learn, was that they are here to provide food. There would be no life saving attempts, no nursing the birds back to health. They had to be put out of their misery, butchered and baked. The children knew this.
Now, as much as I wanted this lesson to be a part of our chicken raising adventure, I dreaded it, and now I wept at our loss. We dearly loved those chickens. They had names and little personalities. But we did what had to be done, albeit tearfully. My dad was there to coach us on what to do. He and mom were great support. They taught me these lessons about animals when I was young. I am thankful they were there to help us pass on the wisdom to my kids.
Greg and my dad set out with guns and binoculars to hunt the coyote who would surely be back soon. They were unable to spot him that day, but his fate is sealed. He has discovered our chickens and will come back over and over again until he has killed them all.
I find myself harboring the appropriate hatred of the competing predators.
So, Flare and Henny are gone.
Farewell girls. Thanks for the eggs.

I should note here that my previous posts have been edited to reflect our mistaken identity of our first laying hen. It wasn't Henny who laid first, it was Penny, and she is still with us. Big ol' Henny did start laying just about 10 days ago, but wasn't the hen I was blogging about. Oops.

Eggs! Eggs! and More Eggs!

Here they come!! The eggs are arriving! It was just 12 days ago that Penny laid her first egg. When that happened, we thought the rest would soon follow! Well, they are now!

Penny has been a faithful girl. She marches into the hen house every day around noon and leaves us a beautiful cream-colored egg. They are small, but each one is just a tiny bit bigger than the last. Following is a video the kids made of their taste test between a store bought "free range" egg and one of Penny's eggs. Guess which egg they liked better!



So, we were waiting for more chickens to lay. We watched them carefully for the same "laying behavior" that we saw in Penny. Well, two days ago, we noticed Cinnamon (my favorite hen - she follows me everywhere and is so curious!) looking around in places she had never looked before. She was coming out of dark corners, and from under bushes with a determination that indicated an impending egg. So we knew it was coming.

What we didn't notice, was Hazel, the quiet Ameracauna looking also. The only indication I got was a strange sighting out of my bedroom window. She was up on the window sill acting a little strange, then seemed to jump down. Later, I went out to retrieve Penny's egg. As I came across the patio, I happened to notice a chicken in the garbage can!! It was Hazel. She had jumped in there from my bedroom window sill! That silly hen! I picked her up hoping to get her into the hen house before she laid, but nope, too late. There was her egg! I took her and her egg to the coop and put them both in a laying box. I hoped that her last memory of coming out of the coop would help her learn to lay there, but alas, the next day, she was perched atop the garbage can squawking.

So, in an effort to prevent this from happening with another hen, we locked Hazel, Cinnamon, and of course Penny in the coop.

This created a scene that I wish I had gotten on video! Cinnamon, who has the most outgoing personality and vocal expression, commenced to squawking loudly! In response, the rooster came over and started honking even louder and pacing outside the coop. This went on for about 20 minutes while Cinnamon checked out each and every box and paced the coop.

I found this on the web. It helps explain why they make so much noise:

For instance, when a hen is ready to lay her egg, she gives a
nesting call, inviting her mate to join
her in finding a nesting site.
Together they find and create a nest by pulling
and flinging around
themselves twigs, feathers, hay, leaves, and loose dirt,
after they have
scraped a depression in the ground with their beaks and feet.
Upon laying
her egg, the hen issues an "egg cackle," which brings the rooster to
her
side, and together they rejoin the flock. United Poultry Concerns

Meanwhile Penny, quiet little Penny, entered her favorite box to lay her egg. Cinnamon eventually settled in the box opposite her.




















When both eggs were laid, Cinnamon started squawking again, announcing the arrival of her egg. You can hear General Cotton (the roo) in the background responding to her. He stayed right by the coop until we let them out. He is a good roo!




We eventually let all three out as we didn't expect to get another egg from Hazel that day.

So, I went out at sunset as they were tucking themselves in bed and checked the boxes one last time, and, Hello!! another egg. We don't know who laid this one! We definitely think it is a "first egg", but whose? My money is on the speckeled sussex, Flare. We will have to watch and see who laid the mystery egg!!!

Now, this morning!! There is another egg! We think this is Hazel's second egg because it is the same color. I guess we will soon have to give up the idea that we will always know who laid the eggs we find. For now it is fun to try to figure it out!

When a hen lays her first egg, our experience has been that it will have a grainy texture, speckles, and be thinner than subsequent eggs. Our exception to that is the RI Red, Cinnamon, who laid a fairly big normal looking egg. It was slightly grainy, though.

I am pleasantly surprised that the eggs seem to have very healthy shells and good colored yolks (per the ONE that we have cracked open). We let the hens free range in our yard and they eat a lot of grass, bugs, seeds, etc. They really don't eat much of the feed we provide. I would guess that it is maybe 1/4 of their diet. I don't feed them any oyster shells, or other supplements. They get kitchen scraps only if they are organic, or from the middle of the fruit (as with cantalope seeds). But they don't get a lot other than what they are finding in the yard.


Where will we put all the eggs? I guess we will need an egg refrigerator!

Our Summer Project 2008 - Raising Chickens Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Why would we want to raise chickens? Well there are many reasons!! But at the time, the purpose was to get us back home!

There are many folks who, in their ignorance about homeschooling, think that homeschoolers must be isolated at home. They must not be getting any social time with peers. Well, I am here to tell you that that isn't the case for any of the homeschooled kids we know. At the end of the last school year, we were so exhausted, burned out, and DONE with the social scene (Or at least I was. I think the kids were having fun), that I just wanted to spend the whole summer at home! I felt like we should spend more time as a family. So we bid farewell to all the chaos, put the school books away, and found ourselves at the local feed store. BTW, I don't recommend buying chicks at a feed store. More on that later.

We didn't have a coop, a place to put a coop, feed, or any other paraphinalea that might go along with owning chickens. But, I figured if we got the chickens, they would live in a box for a few weeks which would give us time to get all that hammered out, right!?

We bought 6 chicks from the local Pet Food Depot. We were told we were buying 3 California Whites and 3 Brown Leghorns. All great egg layers. Leghorns were just what I was looking for. California Whites are a cross between a Leghorn and a California Grey, so good enough. They were all healthy and perky. However, now that they are 5 months old, I can say with confidence that the feed store had NO IDEA what they were selling me! What I actually have (after one of the "leghorns" died) is ONE California white hen, 2 Speckled Sussex hens, A Red Sex-Link hen and a Sex-Link ROOSTER!! HELLO?! Reason #1 for not buying chicks at the local feed store.

We put the chicks in a box with the little water thing and the feed and the wood chips and a heat lamp left over from when we kept that horned toad a couple of years ago. We set them up in the laundry room and closed the door so that our dog couldn't eat them.

Okay! We are chicken farmers now!

NOW WHAT!!??