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!