The Backyard Flock

It's been quite a while since I posted last about our backyard flock of chickens.  That's in part because we've had a lot of changes to our pecking order.  In other words, some "bock-bocks" are no longer with us.  And with all of that, I feel there's some explaining in order.  However, for this post I'd like to focus on the positive and save the grim reaper side of things for another post. :-)

First of all our new group of mail order chicks are doing well.  They have grown SO much and are now basically full grown.  (Remember this post from when they were so cute and fluffy?)

In the photos below, the chicks were 7 weeks old and had just moved out from their large box under a heat lamp in the shop.  We partitioned off a section of our shed for them to live in while they grew and matured.  They did pretty well during their first night in a new place, but it was the second night that we discovered they  were young escape artists. 

We were watching TV after the kids had been put to bed.  We hopped up during commercials to look for a munchie in the kitchen when we noticed two chicks walking up to the back door at nearly 10 PM.  (Remember this was late June so it was still light, but starting to get dusk.)  So we rushed outside and found most of them rather quickly.  They hadn't gone too far...except for Muffy.  That's her below.  She's the quiet one.  And with her coloring and the darkness fast setting in.  We were soon using flashlights to search our yard and then a good area of the neighborhood.  We eventually gave up looking for her that night.  I was just sick to my stomach that night wondering what would become of a poor defenseless baby chick.  Dogs, bears, eagles, ravens, plenty of predator hazards.  I got up a few times during the early morning hours and checked the backyard and again a few more times after Shawn had left for work.  Then finally in a defeated "well, I guess I'll at least go check on the big girls and the garden" attitude I tromped out the backyard again.  That's when I heard a distinctive cheep in the distance.  When I heard it again I started moving towards the sound.  I kept hearing more cheeps so I picked up my pace.  Then I finally got a view of what I knew was her--three houses down the street!!!--in a neighbors yard being pounced on by another neighbors puppy.  I scared that mangy thing off her and was really worried I was too late.  But as soon as I picked her up I could tell she didn't have any major injuries.  She was lucky to escape with just two mild cuts and some missing feathers.  I'm pretty sure her attack had started just before I first heard first peep.  So yeah, I save her life.   And that dog is definitely on my bad list. 

But that lost chicken episode seems like so long ago.  Especially since the same one, Muffy, has now spent 2 other nights away from home because she wandered too far, got disoriented, and couldn't be found in the darkness of the night.  Fortunately, each time we've found her unharmed and quite easily compared to her first runaway attempt.  Muffy, like our other young chickens is doing well and has blended with our older chickens.

For one reason or another our little miss has decided that the barred rock chickens are hers. Not sure why, but she really likes them and so do I.  Lately she's gotten really good at catching them to love on them a bit.

But the best and most recent news from our backyard flock is that we had our long awaited first egg from one of the young chickens today!  Wohoo!  We were all so excited.  It's taken 23 weeks of hard work and care to get this egg so we're enjoying it for sure.  Hopefully it is just the beginning of a bounty of fresh eggs in the coming few years.

New Baby Chicks

Confession Time: I've been holding out on you, dear blog readers.  It's been nearly 4 weeks since we had this exciting news to share, and I am just now putting it on the blog.  If you're a friend of mine on facebook, then you've already seen some of this.  And I guess that's where my guilt comes from.  I usually try to reward my blog readers who take them time to click over and visit my blog with the first information.  But in the busy-ness and excitement of the first day the ease and instant gratification of facebook triumphed.  So I apologize.  But the good news is I have some more recent photos to share.  And they'll be shared here first!

If you haven't figured it out yet, we got some new chicks to add to our backyard flock.  We were so thrilled to receive them in the mail.  The anticipation was intense the whole week right after our hatch day.  The hatchery co-op we ordered from sent us an email on the night of hatch day (a Monday for us) to let us know our chicks had hatched and had been sent out that night via the US Mail.  So then we literally waited by the phone for word from our local post office to pick them up.  They came on exactly the day we had anticipated and we rushed to the post office to pick them up.

Warning: Before you click that button to continue reading, you should know there are A LOT of photos in this post.  Prepare your self. :)  

Chicken Love

 Our little babe has developed a deep love for our backyard flock.  He LOVES being outside with them.

Chicken Update

 As I too often do, this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for much too long.  So a Friday night with the kids in bed seems like a good night to finally finish this one.  A while ago I realized that my my post categories were heavy on the recipes and light on the other three categories.  So lately I've been trying to at least add to those other three categories.  Finally it is time to talk about the feathered friends at our house--technically our backyard.

If you didn't already know, our family happily cares for a backyard flock of eight egg laying hens.  We've been in the backyard chicken coop club for 18 months now and are entering our second winter with our feathered girls.  When we started this adventure, I never thought we'd enjoy it as much as we do.  And I never thought caring for chickens could be so easy until we started doing it ourselves.  Raising our hens has been an endeavor our whole family has enjoyed.  And yes, we have names for all 8 of them: Rosa, Elvira, Eleanor, Miss Scarlett, Irene, Pattie, Sam and Ella. 

I took the picture above a few months ago, but it tells a couple of stories.   For one, there's a chicken on our back step meaning our girls free range.  They sort of demanded it this spring and summer.  When the spring flowers started blooming and temperatures went up, we noticed the chickens were also "awakening" from their "winter survival mode".  We have two sets of 4 chickens--the older/original 4 (about 3 years old) and the younger 4 (about 18 months old).  So the younger 4 started laying eggs for the first time last fall.  That made them full grown hens.  During the winter, we figured they just all put up with each other and concentrated on the basics: eating, drinking, sleeping, laying eggs, and staying warm.  But when spring rolled around the younger 4 tried to improve their pecking order status.  Two of them were especially aggressive and were pecking one of the older girls (Eleanor) so much that they would sometimes draw blood.  They basically harassed her and bullied her so much she wouldn't leave the nest unless a more dominant chicken came into lay.  She was pretty miserable and it was dangerous for her to be with these aggressive ones.  So we started letting them roam around in the backyard.  That seemed to help them get along.  Eleanor had more room to spread out and get away from the aggressive ones.  And all the chickens have learned to stay fairly close to the house and seem to enjoy being out and about.

Full Grown

This week our little chickies turned 23 weeks old.  Officially they are full grown at 20 weeks.  So we now have a total of 8 full grown hens in our humble backyard coop.  These pictures were taken about 3 1/2 weeks ago when the waiting game began for the first egg.
In this picture you can see the two sets of "twins" all grown up.  The brownish chicken to the left (showing us her backside) is Miss Scarlett one of our original hens.  The original four are about 19 months now.

Here are those same four chickens at one week old--their first field trip outdoors away from their heat lamp.

It's so interesting how the coloring has changed on their feathers.  Especially on the black and white ones.

A few months ago, when we realized that all four of the chickies were indeed going to make it and that none of them were surprise roosters, we went ahead and named them.  Unfortunately, I'm not happy about any of the names.  All of my requests were turned down.  For some crazy reason, my brother-in-law let the little missy name the two gold chickens (buff orpingtons) all by herself.  Although I must admit that only reason I think the idea was crazy is because I'm not too fond of the names.  It is nice to encourage her creativity though.  And since everyone else liked the names, they stuck. So we have Patty and Irene.  That's Patty on the left, a bit smaller and lighter colored.  And Irene is on the right, more plump and darker gold.  I just wished we would have named one of them Goldie, but oh well.

 

 Here's Patty again.

Then we have another "twin" set of silver laced wydottes.  Shawn was adamant that one of the chick sets be named Sam and Ella.  [Apologies to my cousin, Ella. :) ]  

Do you get it?  Sam and Ella...Salmonella.  Hilarious, I know.  *insert eye roll*  So once again I didn't get a say in the names.  Hopefully one of these years I'll get to name a chicken Clementine or Fiona.

The only difference between the silver laced wydottes is that Ella (the chicken below) has white tips on her wing feathers.  But when they were originally named Ella's white markings looked like "L's" at the top of her wings. A few more weeks of growing and her marking moved as her feathers continued to grow.

Here's 7 of our 8. Elvira, our black star, was missing.

There's Elvira on the right, running away from me. Why was she running you might ask?  Well, I can assure you it wasn't because I did anything to her.  It's because she was a bit more "on edge"...

because she was MOLTING!  Eww!  Just that word sounds a bit weird, huh?  We've learned that molting is a natural and usually yearly event for chickens.  Sometimes they lay fewer eggs or stop laying altogether during the 12-16 week process.  Even though molting means they loose and then regrow feathers not all chickens are as obvious about it.  Elvira's molting process was completely noticeable.  She made drastic changes in just two days and looked pretty much half her size from all the missing feathers.

This is how she looked this past spring.  Quite different.  Fortunately, her feathers are all growing back in now so she doesn't look quite as strange with her skin showing, and her mood seems to be back to normal.  But her egg laying is still much more infrequent than usual for her.

All four of our original hens have molted over the past few months or are still molting.  Only one of them (Rosa, our Rhode Island Red) continued to lay consistently.  There were several weeks where we were only getting one egg a day!  I was a bit annoyed to be feeding 8 chickens and only getting one or zero eggs each day.  But the good news is that the egg laying seems to be on the upswing.

Speaking of eggs...the chickies started laying eggs about three weeks ago!  The egg on the left was our first (small) chickie egg.  The green egg on the right (from Miss Scarlet) was a bit bigger than normal because that was the first egg that molting chicken had layed in 7 weeks!  The first several eggs that a young hen lays are pretty small--more like quail eggs in size.  But over the past three weeks, I can tell they are gradually getting bigger.

 Here's the chickie egg being dwarfed in the egg carton.  You can get an idea for how small it really is.  

(And for how big that green one was.)

As you can tell, we're still enjoying caring for our backyard flock.  Admittedly, having chickens is even more fun and enjoyable than I had thought it would be.  And fortunately, they are even less work than I thought they'd be!  Yay!
Hope you enjoyed the update on our hens.

Introductions

We've had a couple of nice days recently--and quite frankly I hope the trend continues!  But when the weather is nice, we are more inclined to let the little chickies out and roam the backyard a bit in the fresh air and sunshine.  The other day was the first time that the big girls laid eyes on the the little chickies, and the reaction was interesting. 

Two of the "big girls" didn't seem to care too much.  But the two in the photo above looked quite interested.  Especially Elvira, the one in the photo below.  I was thinking maybe this was a sign of her motherly instincts.  But Shawn said he actually saw her peck at one of the chickies.  Hmm, oh well, so much for the motherly instinct idea.

The chickies were about 3 weeks old in these pictures and you can see that they have started to loose their downy look and are growing their feathers.  I think they actually have a certain awkward teenage look. 

A few more weeks in the shop under the warming light for these little girls and then they'll be ready to permanently move in with the big girls.  Until then, we'll keep giving them outings like this and then watch them crash into a heap of sleepy feathers after they get put back in their usual accommodations.  They are newborns after all. :-)

The More the Merrier

The other day Shawn was passing the time while I finished getting dinner ready by roaming through the postings on Craigslist.  And low and behold he found a posting for free baby chicks.  A guy in town had his plans change and he was giving away 18 baby chicks--just three days old!  So after dinner we went over to his house intending to get 2 or 3 and came home with 4!  Now before you think we just gave in because they were so cute--you're only half right! :)  They definitely are cute, but we realized looking at them how fragile they truly are and how 3 chicks may not necessarily turn into 3 hens, if you know what I mean.  And also, there's not a 100% guarantee that these are all females.  Sometimes the hatchery gets it wrong.  So we decided to get a little more insurance with an extra chick.  And then just look at them!  They're adorable!  And their sweet little peeps are just as adorable as they look.

For the next several weeks they will be hanging out in a cardboard box in our shop (garage) with a heat lamp.  And just as you'd expect, they act like newborns.  The other day I stepped out to check on them to find one of them had fallen asleep with it's face in the feed trough.  The poor little thing was just too tired to finish eating!

But this afternoon I took them out to the backyard for a field trip and photo shoot.

I think they liked getting out.  They definitely seemed to like the chance to explore and discover new things.

And I let the kids hold them for a bit, which they (the kids) loved, of course .

This picture sort of makes me think of the Loony Tunes cartoon with the abominable snowman who finds Bugs Bunny and says something like "I'm going to love you and hold you and squeeze you..."

And I promise that his shirt doesn't just say that he's a monster.  It's got a monster truck on it. :)

A little more calm in the gentle hands of Shawn.

The big boys also decided that today was as good as any day to expand the chicken coop.  This will give them better space to stay warm in the winter and more room for when all 8 chickens are in the coop together.
The space on the left side of this picture (the gray-er colored wood) was all newly constructed today.

 I kept thinking of today as "Extreme Makeover: Chicken Coop Edition"!  :)

power tools can be noisy

Here are the big girls (as we're calling them lately) checking out their new coop space.  The guys got it all finished up today.  Pretty impressive I think.

So just in case you had wondered if we were still enjoying the whole chicken "farming" thing, the answer is a definite YES!

For the Love of Chickens

Lately, my usually dainty little girly has gotten down right dirty.  She's taken to roaming around the backyard, turning over rocks and sticks in search of worms and slugs. 

At first she'd only touch these creatures with her trusty garden shovel or maybe with her garden gloved hand.

But now it seems bare hands are just fine for picking up these slimy things.

But she's not just collecting these for posterity or for her own personal pleasure.  She had a more noble cause in mind.

She's willing to get dirty and touch slimy creatures just so she can throw them through the chain link fence into the chicken yard.  These slimy things are then doomed to become...

...chicken feed.

After all, what's a little slime and dirt in your hand when your finds will cause a flurry of feathers as your beloved chickens race to be the first to gobble up the prize?

It's all for the love of chickens. :)