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.