New Chicks Continued

Since my last blog in September about our home-hatched chicks, we've had a few changes to our backyard flock. None of these are really good changes.

A few weeks ago, Rihanna, foster mom who hatched and raised the chicks, died. I'm not sure why, especially considering she'd finally regrown her feathers and was looking a lot more healthy and less like a turkey vulture. I've learned over the years that even though we protect them from predators and try to keep their environment healthy, chickens are still vulnerable to unknown illnesses. If I notice a chicken has slowed down, I prepare myself for losing her.

Then just this week, Beeker died. I was not surprised as Beeker was now one of our oldest hens at 7 years. Although she willingly helped Rihanna raise the chicks, Beeker did not lay any eggs in the past year, a sign that her body was post-henapausal. Still, Beeker's adorable little pure-white Silkie presence will be missed.

Beeker and Rihanna in happier days

It's hard to mix the bantam (miniature) breeds of chickens with the standard sized ones as the smaller ones get picked on. Our rooster, Ed Sheeran, is technically a bantam also being half Silkie and half Frizzle, but as a male, he's larger and dominates. So in essence, I have to worry less now about making sure the little ones get their fair share of food and roosting space.

In addition to the deaths of our remaining bantam hens, we have gradually come to accept that our two Frizzle/Welsummer chicks are the wrong gender for egg laying; we have two cockerels. I'm not often wrong (just ask my husband and kids...not), but I was way off on these chicks. Or call it believing what you want to be true. Originally named Charlotte and Cindy, I now just call the little rascals Frick and Frack.

Frick (middle) and Frack (left)

New Chicks!

My husband and I have a backyard chicken flock of varying ages and now we have new home-hatched chicks.

We tend to add a few new chicks almost every year, partly because if we see a breed that looks interesting we want it and partly because the egg production slows down dramatically in hens after the age of two years. Many of the older chickens have died off. The average life span of a chicken, assuming no predation, is 4-5 years. The last hen from our very first chicks, an Americauna named Flo, died during the summer at the age of eight years. Since our chickens have a guaranteed retirement here with us and we try hard to protect them from all the creatures of land and air, our oldest hens are now seven-years-old and our youngest turned a year old in May. Sixteen chickens, ten or so different breeds, one of which is a rooster.

Last May we got two Frizzle-Silkie cross chicks and two Welsummer chicks. One of the Frizzles is a red rooster we named Ed Sheeran, after the singer with similar hair (red with a comb-forward to cover your receding hairline). He’s a handsome roo with his wild feathers that look like they were caught in a tornado.

Ed Sheeran, red Frizzle rooster
 

Our other Frizzle is named Rihanna, also after the singer. Our Rihanna, however, is probably the ugliest chicken we’ve ever had. She is tiny, black, about one pound, smaller than our other female Bantam (miniature) breed Silkie hen, Beaker. Rihanna has been hen and rooster pecked so that she is missing a lot of her curly feathers, her head and neck almost completely bald giving her the appearance of a turkey vulture. Bantam hens are slower to mature, often not starting to lay eggs until they are 8 months old. Rihanna didn’t start laying until she was about a year old. I often said Rihanna was a sorry excuse for a chicken; not attractive, very poor layer and skittish.

 

When Rihanna became broody in August, I ignored it at first. Being half Silkie, her breed is known for going broody, which means they will just sit on a nest for three weeks or so, whether or not there are eggs under her. During the broody time, a hen will not lay eggs, getting off the nest only a few times a day for short periods to eat, drink and poop. This characteristic has been bred out of most other breeds of chickens, but not the Silkie. Therefore, Silkie hens are infamous for hatching and raising chicks the old fashioned way. We have used Beaker, our white Silkie, a few times to hatch the eggs of others and raise chicks.

 

A couple of weeks into her broodiness, Rihanna remained steadfast on her nest, and I decided we should go for a few new chicks. With our only rooster being a Frizzle, any chicks that hatched would have a fifty percent chance of having the curly feathers of a Frizzle, yet the size and coloration of the mother. Rihanna and her foster mother, Beaker, were moved into our old coop with six eggs; two cream, one green, two chocolate brown and one with dark spots. I wanted Beaker there for moral support and as a back-up in case Rihanna’s hormones suddenly changed her broodiness mid-gestation. I hoped that Beaker would take over if necessary. I put in more eggs than we actually wanted because our luck has only hatched one live chick out of every four eggs any time we’ve tried to hatch eggs in the past. Plus, with Ed being a smaller breed of rooster than the rest of the flock, I didn’t know how many of the hens he’d successfully bred. Some of the girls had no trouble out running Ed.

Biological Mom - Welsummer Hen - Either Dear Abby or Ann Landers (they're twins)

On Day 21, the first egg hatched! It was from one of the dark brown Welsummer eggs, either Ann Landers’ or Dear Abby’s. The next day, another egg hatched! Also a Welsummer. The other eggs either weren’t fertile or didn’t survive. So we have two new chicks, and by the coloration, both appear to be little pullets (young hens). One has the curly Frizzle feathers. Daughter Kelsey has named them Charlotte and Cindy.

Grandma Beaker with Foster Mom, Rihanna, and chick

Cute chicks, being raised by a not-so-cute yet very attentive mother. It is fun to watch how Rihanna scratches the dirt and clucks to her babies or how she lets them snuggle under her if they are cold. Grandma Beaker seems to enjoy being around to help out yet she doesn’t try to steal the chicks away from Rihanna. And so, the miracle of life in the world of backyard chickens continues.  

Rihanna with her brood



 

Counting Chickens Before They Hatch

Last summer, a season which seems like a dream right now with the umpteenth snow falling in Connecticut, Jay and I discussed chickens.  We had a backyard flock of twelve, eleven hens of various breeds and one awesome Cochin rooster named Aslan.  We had lost two hens during the summer to unknown causes.  Lucy the Rhode Island Red and Righty, a Silver Spangled Hamburg, were found dead in the coop.  Our coop isn’t big enough to handle a lot of chickens so our discussion centered around replacing the hens we’d lost, not adding more than two. 

I love having the pale green eggs laid by our two Easter Eggers/Americauna’s, Faye and Flo, but they are going on five-years-old and don’t lay as often.  I reasoned that if we were going to add another hen, she should be an Easter Egger as well.  Jay suggested we hatch our own chicks, but I was not sold on the idea. 

We have two Silkie hens, Mumbles and Beeker,  who seem to always be broody.  Silkies are known for being broody which means they feel a need to sit on the nest for weeks at a time with few breaks in an effort to hatch whatever may or may not be underneath their bodies.  Silkies are often used to hatch eggs the natural way (no plug in incubators).   I had read that hens which are Easter Egger crosses will still lay green eggs which would be our case; Easter Egger/Cochin mixes.  If we hatched our own, the ideal would be to get one or two female chicks who grew to look like their father, but laid green eggs.  The worst case would be hatching another rooster.  That’s the risk of hatching your own eggs as opposed to buying chicks that are already sexed.   We have a no-kill policy with our flock so gendercide was out of the question. 

I wanted to wait and go to a poultry show to buy chicks from a breeder where I could be guaranteed of the gender.  The coop is small, so adding males would only take up unnecessary space.  Roosters are not needed for hens to lay eggs and I was afraid of them fighting each other.  If we were to add chickens, they really needed to be female.  Also, since our Silkies had hatched eggs before for a friend, I’d learned that the chances of getting viable chicks were slim.  It’s heartbreaking to watch an egg hatch only to have the chick die before it can exit the shell. 

So I compromised.  We’d try to hatch our own and if it didn’t work, we’d go an upcoming poultry show and buy a sure thing, a young pullet or two.  This gave our birds almost a month to produce home-grown chicks (hopefully little girls). 

Faye and Flo cooperated and gave us two eggs each, two days apart, then went on their merry ways.  Most hens just lay the egg and go, trusting society to raise their children, or not.  They don’t care.  I wrote the laying date on each egg with a Sharpie so I would know when to expect hatching.  Beeker and Mumbles were both broody so I put two eggs under each hen.  Twenty-one days later, two eggs were rotten, one hatched a dead chick and we got one live chick.  The live chick came out of the darker green egg which told me that Flo was the biological mother.   I was skeptical, but Kelsey said she’d had a dream about the chick; it was a girl and we had to name her Penelope.  Kelsey was often clairvoyant when she was younger so I felt somewhat reassured.

Newborn Penelope hides under foster mom Beeker

 We set Penelope up with her foster mom, Beeker, in a cat carrier in our fenced-in garden.  It was late August so the outside temperatures were perfect for a hatchling.  I studied chick pictures of Cochins and Easter Eggers to try to determine who Penelope would take after.  Our rooster is a partridge color, absolutely gorgeous with his patchwork of colors and his long, copper-laced teal cape feathers.   Partridge-colored hens are plainer than the roos, but still more attractive than the Easter Egger golden brown.   Penelope looked just like a baby Americauna/Easter Egger with her chipmunk black stripe.  The only difference was that she had feathered legs like a Cochin.  Oh well.  I just hope she remained a girl. 

When Penelope started chest-bumping her mother and her neck grew longer, like a cockerel’s, I got nervous.  What’s the male form of “Penelope”?   Peter?  I watched You Tube videos on how to determine the sex of a chick and tortured little Penelope by holding her upside-down, her mother clucking at me anxiously while I examined the chick’s vent, a.k.a. “hoo-hoo”.  Nothing popped up which would indicate a little roo, so maybe Kelsey was right.  Of course, professional chicken sexers can make mistakes and I was only You Tube trained.

Penelope and her fluffy white mother were inseparable, even as the child outgrew her mom.  After about a month of keeping them confined to the garden, I put the two in with the flock.  They were accepted pretty easily as the others were used to seeing the little peeping chick run around by now.  If another hen came near Penelope, little two-pound Beeker would challenge her.  Silkies are a bantam breed which means they are mini chickens.  Bantams are about half to a third the size of our other hens so the sight of Beeker chest-bumping another hen was almost comical.  Penelope’s sire is a Cochin, one of the larger breeds of chickens and weighs in at nine pounds.  For the chicken people out there, Cochin’s also come in bantam size, but ours is a standard.  She should be a big girl (again, hoping she’d stay a she). 

Aslan the rooster.  Beeker is the white fluff directly behind him.
 

Penelope (center) with the flock.  Her biological mother, Flo, is left of her in brown.  Foster mom, Beeker, on the far right.

 

Finally, Penelope’s feathers started coming in during her second month.  Her Easter Egger down feathers and black stripe was replaced by the brown coloring of a partridge colored hen, complete with copper-laced teal feathers on her cape.  Definitely a girl, and a partridge color to boot! 

Penelope as a teenager

If there was any doubt, Penelope started laying eggs in January.  She still doesn't look like a mature hen, more of a teenager.  Penelope's eggs are a pale green like the other Easter Eggers, but a darker sage color.  Her eggs are still small because she’s young, but I expect the size will increase.  We have our first home-grown chicken to carry on the green egg laying in exactly the color and gender we were hoping for.  

Our tray of rainbow eggs.  Penelope's are the center two.

 

Chickens: Down One, Up Three

My family started our first backyard chicken flock almost three years ago. As I’ve mentioned before on previous blogs, the first day-old chicks arrived via US Mail from the Meyer Hatchery in Ohio. We began with 10 chicks, four of which were Easter Eggers (layers of blue-green eggs, often referred to as Ameraucanas or Araucanas). The other six were Silver Spangled Hamburgs. Of our original birds, we now have just four left; one Hamburg chick died during the first week, three Hamburgs were sold, one Easter Egger we lost to the hawk last fall, and just recently we lost another Easter Egger.

Our First Chicks

Foster, our almost white Easter Egger, was found dead in the coop by my husband Jay this past weekend. This is the first hen we’ve lost to natural causes as opposed to flying predators. The only explanation I can offer is that Foster had not laid an egg in about a year (Foster used to lay a paler, rounder green egg so I knew which were hers) and had recently been hanging out in the nesting box, a behavior she’s never exhibited before. Her feathers looked fantastic and healthy, and she had no outward signs of illness. She just died. Of course, there had to be some underlying cause like heart or kidney failure for Foster’s death, but since we didn’t have a necropsy done, I don’t know for sure. If the rest of the flock seemed sick, I’d probably be contacting UCONN for testing. I’ve heard of chickens just expiring and the other extreme of life spans up to 15 years.

Foster (white hen) sharing pasta with her first flock-mates

I was away at a cat show when Jay called to tell me about Foster’s death. Since he ties his own fishing flies, often using feathers as material, I asked him if he was going to use any of Foster’s white feathers. No, he couldn’t bring himself to scalp or pluck a bird he knew as a pet for three years. Jay used to hunt, a sport he had to give up when I moved in, so dissecting a dead animal doesn’t make him queasy. However, pet chickens have an elevated status over wild animals. I’ll always remember Foster as the one who was easy to identify from the moment she arrived, as she was the only all-yellow chick in our first batch. Faye and Flo, our remaining Easter Eggers, look very similar, distinguished only by Faye’s darker head.

Baby Foster

Although we are down one hen, we had, coincidentally, attended a small poultry show a couple of weeks ago. My intention was to get a young adult Black Copper Maran pullet because of their ability to lay a chocolate brown egg. Many poultry exhibitors were selling chickens outside the show area, but all that I saw were either small breed pairs or baby chicks. Chicks are more difficult in the beginning as they require heat lamps, special starter feed, frequent monitoring, an indoor cage and age-appropriate companionship for the first five to six weeks. Females normally begin laying eggs at around five months.

If I got one Maran chick, I’d have to get her a buddy. So we ended up with three chicks, bringing our flock total to 17. All of the new babies are deemed to be female by the breeder and have been named by daughter Kelsey. “Nestle” is our Maran.  Nestle's buddies are “Lemon Meringue”, a cross between a Lemon Cuckoo Orpington (yellow striped) and a Jubilee Orpington (multi-colored), and “Narnia”, a Buff Orpington (standard buff color). The new chicks are about 2 weeks apart in age and the smaller ones tend to rest under the bigger Lemon Merinque who plays Mama hen.  Lemon Merique's sire is a 14-pound rooster, so I'm curious to see how large she'll become.


New Additions

I love having chickens that all look different and lay different colors and sizes of eggs. Nestle should start laying her dark chocolate eggs in the late fall and add even more variety to our egg collection.

Peace and Harmony Gotta Go

In a May blog, Baby Chicks Part 2, I wrote about how two of the fertilized eggs a friend gave me had hatched.  Thelma, our Jersey Giant hen, raised them, giving us wonderful images of a mother hen and her two chicks clucking and peeping around the yard.  Since all our existing chickens were kept caged inside the first five weeks with heat lamps until their "big girl" feathers came in, it was nice to see the little fluffy peeps living as nature intended.

Mother Thelma with Fuzzy Peace and Harmony

The blond chick became white and as it learned to fly, would roost in a nearby tree instead of in the coop with the rest of the hens.  Last Christmas, I'd thrown out the white dove ornaments, deciding they were too chewed by cats to make it another year.  My husband Jay thought it'd be funny to decorate the small maple tree by the chicken coop with the doves (which have suspicious-looking hummingbird beaks; who ever heard of a Christmas hummingbird?).  This tactful display remained until the leaves came in this spring and the ornaments finally made it to their intended destination.  When the white chick started roosting in the same maple tree, the first thought was that she looked like a dove.  Every evening we looked in the tree where she perched about six feet up, got her down and put her safely in the coop with the rest of the flock.

Without names for the chicks and still hopeful that they were both girls, I thought of the name Peace for the white one.  I used to have a cat named Peace as a child, so named because I had a pony called Love.  I contemplated naming the dark chick Love, but then tried to come up with other names.  War, perhaps.  War and Peace.  Peace and Hope (hoping they were pullets or young hens).  Kelsey vetoed those ideas, suggesting instead that I call the other one Harmony.  Fine, Peace and Harmony it is. 

As Peace and Harmony developed I studied their combs and wattles.  If one had a redder or more pronounced head coloration, that one was likely male.  They looked the same.   With no young roos to compare them to, I declared they were either both pullets or both cockerals.  Ever optimistic, I still referred to them as "she". 

Chicks grow rapidly and the pullets (technically a hen under the age of one year is considered a pullet) can start laying as early as five months.  I couldn't remember how old our one former rooster, Shanaynay, was when he started crowing.  A crowing half-grown chick is a sure sign that you don't have a pullet.  Thelma decided she was done with child-rearing and began chasing her brood away, somewhat like a mother cat who's trying to wean her kittens.  Peace and Harmony hung out with one another, peeping at the bottom of the pecking order of the flock.

The other day Jay was outside when he heard a chicken commotion.  Peace and Harmony were fighting.  Down South, we'd say they were "rassling".  Previously, they would bump chests and play fight, but this time they were out for blood.   The other chickens circled around to watch, chanting, "Fight! Fight! Fight!"  Buffy, our most outgoing hen decided she'd apparently seen enough and barged in-between the two, breaking the fight up.  Peace had a cut on his head and was bleeding.  If we'd had any doubt that we had two little cockerals, the fight and Harmony's subsequent response cast all that doubt aside.  He crowed. 

Two-months-old and fighting already.  When we had Shanaynay, he didn't become aggressive until he was about a year old.  No way was I keeping Peace and Harmony when they were the exact opposite of their names already.  It may just be fighting each other now, but I could easily envision my legs becoming the next target.  I caged Harmony, made sure Peace's cuts were just superficial and immediately contacted my friend Lorraine who had given me the eggs.  I arranged to give the chicks back the next day where they could live out their lives on her farm.  If not in peace and harmony, at least where I don't have to deal with any little cockeral fights.

Harmony and Peace - a Major Misnomer

Baby Chicks Part Two

In my blog Counting My Eggs, I promised to keep my readers informed when the fertilized chicken eggs my hens were sitting on hatched.   Although I started out with eleven eggs shared by Mumbles and Thelma, Mumbles decided she'd been sitting long enough and threw in the towel.  Then Buffy, the Buff Orpington, thought she'd wax maternal and sit on the eggs.  In between all this, there were times when the eggs weren't covered.  One by one, they rotted and cracked.  They were literally half-cooked, maybe fertile, maybe not.  I'm sure the phrase, "last one's a rotten egg" comes from the situation where chicks start hatching and the
egg(s) that never hatches is rotten.  The stench is unmistakeable. 

Thelma prepares for motherhood

In the end, we have two viable chicks, a blond and a reddish-brown one.  Since the person who gave the eggs to me doesn't know the breeds of her chickens or her roosters, this is a guessing game.  The brown one has feathering on her legs so it'll be interesting to see how he/she/it develops.  I'm automatically referring to the chicks as girls, but I honestly don't know the gender.  Chickens, unlike puppies, are very difficult to sex at this age.  I'm thinking of naming them adrogenous names like "Pat", "Chris" or "Terry".  Any suggestions are welcome.

I felt guilty at taking the pheasant chicks away from Thelma after all her dedication to hatching them and want to give her a chance to enjoy motherhood.  If she never becomes broody again, then perhaps she will have learned that children are too much work.  Since I'm trying to let these chicks grow up with their adopted mother Thelma (Buffy proved too aggressive to be allowed this privilege), I have a new set of challenges.  Normally I would raise the chicks in a cage with a heat lamp in my basement until fully feathered at five weeks.  At five weeks they are adolescents and ready to move outside.  The nesting box the chicks were hatched in is about two feet off the ground so it would be difficult for fuzzy peeps to navigate that height, even with a ramp.  Plus, the other hens are not maternal toward the chicks and could present a danger to anything in their nesting boxes. 

Thelma demonstrates how to scratch out a snack to her peeps

Luckily our garden has an eight-foot fence around it, part of which is sectioned off for the chickens to keep them out of the planted veggies.  During the winter, we strung fishing line every three feet across the top of it to deter the hawks so the chickens would have another safe place to hang out.  Since our compost pile is in the corner of the garden, this provides a lot of enjoyment for the girls to rifle through our leftovers, spread the compost around and pick out worms and grubs. 

I decided the hens' fenced in garden area would become the nursery.  I turned the bottom half of a large doghouse over and placed a cat carrier on top of that.  Chickens need to roost off the ground, thus the doghouse base.  The cat carrier can be locked up at night.  I drape a sheet of plastic over the carrier at night for further warmth and rain protection.  Probably not as warm as the nesting box in the coop, but I keep in mind that Thelma's underside had to be about 95 degrees in order to have been able to incubate the eggs.   I put food and a waterer in the carrier with them, which the chicks quickly learned to use.  The garden is closed off to the other hens, something they resent, but have to accept.  The idea is that as the chicks grow, the rest of the flock will get used to them behind the safety of the fence so that the new members will be able to acclimate seamlessly. 

Our contraption we're calling the nursery

Thelma is a big girl and a wonderful mom.  I have to lift her up to see the chicks.  When it's warm, they come out from under their mother.  Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that we can keep them safe until they are grown and that both are hens.

Thelma and her brood in their nest

As a sidenote, I am now a blogger on the Ledyard Patch, a local online newspaper.  I will be blogging about the same types of subjects as I do here, perhaps revamping some of my old stuff.  If my followers could please comment or click the Recommend button on the Ledyard Patch blog to indicate their support, I'd give them each a Maine Coon kitten.  Not really, but still, I'd be grateful.

Two Week's Difference

Between the kittens and the chicks, we have all stages of cuteness in the house right now.  I realized that the age difference between the two sets of kittens and chicks is about two weeks for each species and thought it interesting to see how much an animal can grow during that time, whether it's a mammal or a bird.  The 3.5 week old kitten on the left of the photo is like a toddler, walking unsteadily and interacting with humans now (he likes to have his tummy tickled).  The other kitten is just over one week old and still crawls on his belly.  His eyes are open, but his vision isn't very developed yet.  He still finds his mother by using his nose.  The two litters are kept separately for now, supervised by their respective mothers.  Eventually, the litters will be combined when the kittens are at similar stages, probably around 6 to 8 weeks of age.

We have three chicks we got from Agway who are about two weeks older than the four from the hatchery in Ohio.  The chicks pictured are supposed to be similar in size when they are mature in 6 months.  Even with their size differences, all the chicks get along well in their brooder.

The chick on the left is a Rhode Island Red, her big girl feathers starting to come in already.  The little peep on the right is a Buff Orpington still covered in cute chick fuzz.  Whereas the older chicks are now at their awkward ugly stage and the size of a small dove, the little ones still look like Easter chicks.  

Cute and Fuzzy Peeps

I ordered 6 new chicks from Meyer Hatchery over a month ago that were expected to hatch out and ship on April 5th.  Then last week, Jay and I attended a Back Yard Chicken seminar sponsored by Nutrena Foods and held at our nearby Agway.  We learned little we didn't already know at the presentation since the presenter obviously doesn't have chickens and was there to read from her Powerpoint slides and sell chicken feed.  However, we did find out that Agway had new chicks to sell, Rhode Island Reds, Plymouth Barred Rocks, and Red Sex Links.  So we came home with one of each that evening.

I feared I would have too many with 3 new ones, 6 more coming and 7 grown hens in the coop already.  Jay added another perch in the coop to accomodate the new ones who will be integrated in a couple of months.  Then the hatchery called to let me know that 3 of the chicks I ordered were not available due to unproductive hens and infertile eggs.  I added one more Silkie to the adjusted order of three so the other bantam Silkie wouldn't be the lone little one.  Silkies are a bantam breed, meaning they are miniature chickens, reaching a maximum size of less than one pound.  The red Silkie is shown above (the other is blue).  The other chicks are a Buff Orpington and a Light Brahma.  The Silkies and the Brahma have feathers growing down their legs already so Kelsey is trying to think of hobbit names for them.  Since Silkies are too small to be sexed, we're taking our chances that one or both may be little cockerals.  The others are supposed to be pullets.  If anyone has any good name suggestions for the seven new chickies, please send them in.

The age difference between the Agway chicks and the new ones is only about 2 weeks, making the new chicks look even tinier.  The Silkie chicks could easily fit inside a plastic Easter egg.

News from the older hens:  I weighed Thelma, the Jersey Giant hen, the other day.  She's 6 pounds now at 6 months of age.  She's supposed to grow until she's two years old and reach about 10 pounds.  By comparison, the Americaunas are about 4.5 pounds at 11 months.  Thelma finally laid her first egg yesterday, a beautiful, pale brown one.  The different colors in the nesting box along with the decoy golf ball made quite the picture. 

The Chicks First Outing

On the one non-raining, half-way warm day we've had recently (can't remember when that was now) here in Connecticut, I took the chicks outside. The boyfriend, Erik, was over for Kelsey's 14th birthday celebration so I had the two lovebirds help me set up the plastic circular barrier I got for the kittens outside in the sun. We then loaded the babies in a cat carrier and took them out the cellar door into their first outdoor adventure. They are shown here, pretty freaked out by the whole thing.





On a side note, we lost one of Silver Spangled Hamburgs (shown on the left) last week....no apparent reason. I had just checked on them about 2 hours earlier and when I went into the basement again, one of the smaller girls was dead. I was reminded of how fragile baby chicks can be. It was sad, but admittedly not as tragic as when I lose a kitten.


The chicks grow visibly every day. When I first got them, their wings were little helpless appendages, like the front legs of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Now they can actually fly short distances with full feathers (not chick fuzz) on a wingspan of about 8 inches in the Americaunas.


The Americaunas (shown to the right) are much larger now than the Hamburgs and are proving to be less flighty and more curious. One of them, Fenix, is already showing an interest in me. I can get them to perch on my hand fairly easily although I have to chase the Hamburgs around the brooder to get them first. Having had parakeets before, I can tell you with absolute certainty that I prefer chickens. They're not as intelligent as parakeets, but they don't bite and they tend to stay perched on a finger. I can't tell you how many times a parakeet has drawn blood on my hands in the past.


We kept the chicks outside about an hour, completely supervised at all times of course. By the end of the hour, they had relaxed enough to start scratching and pecking at the grass. Now if only it'll stop raining for a day so I can take them out again.




Kelsey and Erik become Chick Handlers

The Chicks Are One Week Old

Although the names haven't been assigned yet, they have been chosen. Chicks change dramatically as they morph into full-fledged hens so we'll probably wait until their feathers come in and hope we can tell them apart by then. Kelsey chose the names for the 4 Americaunas - Fea, Flow, Fenix, and Foster. That breed tends to vary in color so we can tell the Americaunas apart, more or less. I did a search for redneck girl names (yes, there is such a category) and came up with Bobbie Sue, Earlene, Georgette, Larlene, Shaneyney and Daisy Mae for the 6 Silver Spangled Hamburgs.

The chicks are doing well; eating, drinking, pooping and growing. Yesterday I tried to clean poop off the butts of some of them (called "pasting up" in chicken terms). Yes, my world seems to still revolve around poop. As I held a chick in one hand, I tried to get the poop stuck on her feathers off with a wet paper towel. When that didn't work, I resorted to clipping it off with a pair of small scissors. The chick peeped quite loudly in protest. She peep-screamed. Amazingly, the cats came running. They genuinely seemed concerned the same way they do over a distressed kitten. Olivia even tried to take the chick from me. I honestly don't know if her maternal instincts told Olivia to save the distressed chick or if the loud peeping aroused her primal instincts to kill. It was an interesting reaction though. The cats have accepted the chicks and enjoy watching them but not with the same predatory intensity as when they watch birds and squirrels at the outside feeders.

Here are some new photos I took today.

An Americauna Chick

Foster, the blond Americauna chick and the most recognizable one so far

A Silver Spangled Hamburg

The Chickies Are Here!

I've been waiting for their arrival to post about my new venture.....hens. I've been wanting to get some sort of ground dwelling outdoor bird for a while to help keep the tick population down. We live in Connecticut, famous for the discovery of Lyme disease in nearby Lyme, CT. Jay has always boasted of the superior fertilizer created by chickens. For the past year, we've been getting our eggs from the Groton Family Farm where the red and black hens are so curious and cute. Knowing how most animals used for consumption are raised, I felt good about getting our eggs from happy hens who roamed a fenced in pasture. Jay always raved about how much better the farm raised eggs tasted. After talking to one of the vet techs who has chickens at Stonington Veterinary Hospital where I take the other pets and getting encouragement from Jay, I started looking into chickens seriously.

I found Backyard Chickens.com to have a lot of good information about the care and keep of chickens. I researched the various hatcheries as I couldn't find a local feed store that had chicks. Even the one hatchery I found located in Norwalk told me they just have the home office in Connecticut and the chicks all come from Ohio. It turns out most chickens are hatched in Ohio...who knew? Seems to be the central location for shipping but a lot of hatcheries have a minimum of 25 chicks per shipment.

My original goal was to have 3 hens, no roosters (yes they can lay eggs without a rooster). I learned about roosters from experience as a kid when I kept my horse at the neighbor's barn. The Burrell's had several chickens, Guinea hens and one rooster. Not only was I warned that the rooster may try to "flog" (attack) me, I found that they crow all day, not just in the morning. Roosters are beautiful, but loud and not for me.

The Meyer Hatchery could ship as few as 3 chicks, but recommended a larger number so they can better share body warmth. Chicks are shipped out the same day they are hatched because they have 72 hours of yolk stored in their bodies. After that time, shipping gets a lot more complicated because they have to eat so often. Seems cruel to a Maine Coon breeder who won't let her kittens leave before they are 12 weeks old, but hey, they are the experts.

After researching the breeds, I settled on 4 Americaunas, also known as the Easter Hen because of the blue-green colored eggs they lay. The Americauna is a multi-colored bird and supposed to be a friendly hen. I later added 6 Silver Spangled Hamburgs to the shipment because I was getting nervous that they may not all make it. Hamburgs are white with black-tipped feathers and lay white eggs. We wanted the chickens for bug control, eggs, manure and as pretty pets. Jay has been joking about naming them; Roaster, Fryer, Tender, etc. prompting Kelsey to adamently remind him that no chicken killing is allowed. Sorry, I couldn't eat something I named.

As I had to wait over a month for my chicks to be available (yes, there is a waiting list for chickens), I had time to read up on chicken care, gather supplies and plan for their brooder pen. They will stay inside in the brooder (a ferret cage I had in the basement) until they are about 5 weeks old. Then they will go outside to the chicken coop that Jay will build by adapting the fort side of the swingset.

My peeps were set to ship out on their birthday, May 26th. I had alerted the Ledyard Post Office to expect them but by 5 pm on the 27th, no chicks. I had stayed home all day awaiting their call. This morning at 7:00, Linda from the Post Office called to let me know my chicks were here! I plugged in their heat lamp to get it warmed up for them and rushed to the post office (about a 1 mile drive for us). Linda joked about me being a new mom, let me into the back and opened the peeping box to check their condition. All ten were alive and chickie cute.

So they are finally here. As I came in the door carrying my peeping box, I was followed all the way to the basement by a cat entourage. The only name Kelsey has determined so far is Foster, she's the blond Americana. I relate their colors and patterns to dogs and cats so the Hamburgs are the smaller, merle patterned chicks; like on an Australian shephard. Three of the Americaunas look like brown tabby colors. Foster would be a solid cream. I made sure the brooder is cat proof and have tried to explain to the cats that these are not toys. They do like the new entertainment though.

I know my family will now have fresh material for Jay...."Sharon always wanted to live on a farm, Jay."

"Be careful, not only does she love horses, but she always talked about wanting a Jersey cow too and you have the space for it."

Olivia and Kinsey check out the chicks