Dave Marquardt's WeblogToday's Page Hits: 383
This page validates as XHTML 1.0, and will look much better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device. It was created using techniques detailed at glish.com/css/.
And then there were 13
On Friday the kid's elementary school PTA held its annual carnival. One of the attractions was a petting zoo. They had goats, piglets, rabbits and chickens.
Karen has been trying to figure out what to do with one our young roosters, Harry, who was hatched out in early January. He's acting more and more like a rooster, and is getting a bit unpleasant to be around. Also, living in a suburban neighborhood, we think sure the neighbors might get annoyed with hearing a rooster in the early morning, so we've always intended to get rid of our roosters. Karen had posted a "free rooster" note on a pet chickens web site, but got no interest. The next alternative was to take him up to the feed store and give him away.
Anyway, back to the petting zoo. Karen asked the petting zoo owner if she'd take a Rhode Island Red rooster, and she said she would. So Karen got our rooster and took him over there.
Our son Nick was upset and said he was going to miss Harry, but hasn't talked that much about him since then, so maybe he won't miss him that much. He still has 9 other chicks, 4 hens, 3 cats, a brother and mom and dad on which to shower his affection, so maybe that's enough :).
Posted at 04:52PM Apr 14, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Life |
14 chickens
When I last wrote about chickens, we had nine chicks indoors and four hens outdoors. Last week I came home from work and was looking at the indoor chicks in their 2' W × 4' L × 2' H box and noticed a little black chick. To this I said "Where the heck did that come from?" I was told it was a silver laced Wyandotte pullet (female chick). Karen knows she's going to have to get rid of the new roosters at some point, so she wanted one more hen. Okaaay.
At first, the little chick seems quite wary of the much larger and older chicks, and got chased around by a Rhode Island Red rooster. But by the next morning, she seemed to have settled in and started hanging out with the larger chicks and keeping warm. She particularly liked our largest chick, which we think is a Buff Orpington rooster. She even roosts with the larger chicks. Also, she really stands out as the other chicks are buff and red and she's black with a bit of silver. Pretty cute.
The older chicks have a few weeks before it's warm enough for them to go live outside. We're not sure how this will work with the little Wyandotte, who may not be old enough to go outside yet. When we've taken the older chicks outside for a few hours, the poor little Wyandotte makes lots of noise and really misses her friends.
Posted at 01:21PM Feb 13, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Life |
Brand new chicks
Late last week and over the weekend we had 9 chicken eggs hatch in our incubator. We started out with 20 or 22 (don't remember), discarded some earlier as they weren't developing or had stopped developing, and were left with about 15 eggs we hoped would hatch. Getting 9 is pretty good, as Karen knows folks who've tried hatching multiple times and gotten no chicks at all.
We have
Buff Orpington sounds like some sort of macho guy to me, but Buff Silkie sounds like an oxymoron, as we think of buff as well built and silkie as kind of prissy looking. But in this case, of course, buff refers to the color, a light blondish color.
Sam and Karen took care of turning the eggs three times a day and candling them to see if they were developing. My only involvement with the incubation was to help wire up the incubator. I wired up a light bulb to a hot water heater thermostat, and Karen used a thermometer to help set the termperature. I also wired up a computer fan from an old computer we still have around to an A/C adapter. Funny thing about that, the best place on the web to find instructions on wiring a computer fan to an A/C adapter was a web site dedicated to growing pot! :)
The nine little chicks seem to be doing well, and they act like chickens right out of the box. They test new things by pecking at them, so every new chick that was born was pecked by the others first :). We moved them to a brooder box with pine shavings, they had to peck at the pine shavings to determine whether it was something to eat. We saw one poor chick got one of her toes grabbed by another who thought it might be something to eat!
Posted at 05:26PM Jan 07, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Life |
