Doth quoth the DaveM

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

• 4 Buff Silkies
• 3 Buff Orpingtons
• 2 Rhode Island Reds

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  | 

Three hens a laying

We now have three of our four hens laying eggs. Shiner's eggs continue to be the largest, and they're a medium reddish brown color. Eggo started laying a couple of weeks back, smaller blue green eggs. And just last week Chick started laying light brown pullet eggs. So we've got loads of eggs to eat and give away.

Posted at 01:07PM Jun 25, 2007 by Dave Marquardt in Life  | 

Snake in the nest box

Previously I talked about the four hens who live in our back yard. The oldest hen, Shiner Bock, has been giving us eggs for a few weeks now. We're expecting the other hens to start laying soon, so we check the nest boxes a few times every day.

Yesterday, I opened the lid of the two nest boxes, where we have nesting material and some golf balls and a plastic hollow Easter egg, so the hens get the idea that this is a good place to lay eggs. Much to my surprise, I saw a snake with its jaws wrapped around the plastic Easter egg. At first I thought one of my boys was messing with me, as they have lots of rubber and plastic snakes that they play with. As my wife Karen has said many times, one of these days she's going to pick up what she thinks is a rubber snake and have a nasty surprise. But anyway, I saw the snake's tail wiggle a bit, so I quickly closed the lid and called Karen over. Hey, they're her chickens, maybe she's heard of some great method to get rid of snakes. And maybe I'm a wimp :).

Karen opened the lid, and banged on the box a few times with a board, and the snake eventually slithered out of the coop and into the garden. He was about 3-4 feet long, and according to our reptile book, he was probably a rat snake.

So now we have a couple things to think about. First, how many other eggs has this snake gotten? Second, how to we keep him out, other than hope he'll succeed in swallowing a plastic egg or golf ball and die? We can also hope the chickens will catch him in the coop or run and kill him, and get a good meal too!

Posted at 12:24PM Jun 04, 2007 by Dave Marquardt in Life  |  Comments[2]

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

So, there's the old question Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In our case, it was the chicken.

Okay, let me back up and explain. A few months back my wife Karen decided she and my son Nick were going to raise hens for eggs. She started with four chicks, of which three (Chick, Eggo and Yoga) have survived to this day. A few weeks back, when Nick and I were gone on a cub scout campout, Karen and Sam, my other son, went out and bought a chick, Mrs. Shiner Bock, a few weeks older than the others. Yesterday, Shiner presented us with her first egg, a brown egg with little red flecks on it!

So, in our case, indeed, the chicken came before the egg.

Posted at 01:17PM May 08, 2007 by Dave Marquardt in Life  |  Comments[1]