Monday Apr 14, 2008
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 :).
Wednesday Feb 13, 2008
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.
Monday Jan 07, 2008
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!
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