Chicks is Chippin', Eggs is Pippin'

Yeah, the kids brought their incubator down here after a test run up at Jade's grandparents' house. It has been running in the dining room for a while or so.

Late last week chickies began to peck and pick their way out of their shells. These so far are mottled, blue, and black standard cochins.

They are also crazy cute.

However, after having raised many hatches of chicks and many store bought chicks on the porch down in the village, I am utterly attuned to the distress calls of chicks.

And every single one cheeps stridently for a while after it exits it's ovoid enclosure......

Yup, I been noticing.....

Boidies

Blue Cochin rooster. I love the way he crows.

The kids got a new rooster Sunday and a few new chicks, plus Laura has her little brood.

Thus the coops are pretty well populated.

  

The Wild Side

Poultry style. The kids are building hen coops in the heifer barn and gathering up laying birds so as to sell eggs...speaking of which, we are eating the eggs they raise and they sure are good.

Anyhow, they are off to the swap this morning with a mean hen and a superfluous and bad-tempered rooster, plus a some herb plants to sell or trade.

While they were up in the old hen coop, catching the rooster, they discovered that Laura, the little banty Cochin that Teri gave us, has chickies. They were running in and out of the peacock coop, not a safe locale for babies, so Becky is out catching them to cage them safely with their mama.

Laura is an old chicken and a good, smart mama. She used to have a paramour of her own ilk named George, but varmints got him.

Roosting with the Roosters

Who is that, w-a-a-a-a-a-y up there in the box elder tree?

Hmmm, orange and speckled critters,

spotlighted in the light from the setting summer sun

Why, it's the chickens! Enjoying a strong sense of enrichment!

Right over top of this chicken-eating dog,

who evidently also keeps them safe from the wild things

that want to get to know them better

Been working on a Farm Side column about the new agreement between HSUS and UEP on a national standard for hen cages. You know, those "enriched" colony cages that will cost $4 billion bucks to construct. Just thought I would show you the reaction of chickens to the ultimate in enriched environments....the great outdoors.

Here is another column I liked that addresses the topic

Nationwide Chicken Massacre

RIP

We lost a hen last night up on the bowling green (yes, this old Victorian homestead sports an actual bowling green...not that, other than mowing it, we have a clue what to do with it.)

It was one of the silver-laced Wyandottes that Teri gave us...the last one. She is also having problems with predators getting her birds.

I have mixed emotions. The hens are wrecking my garden, slurping up bean seedlings before they finish emerging from the ground. Still, she was a pretty old thing....

Then I read Fuzzy's Friday blog and discovered that hens are coming under attack way out west too. What is the world coming to?

Here a Chick

Laura surprised us with five little chickies....just as we had decided that she was sitting on infertile eggs and were going to switch them out with a peacock egg. Wouldn't that have been fun? Laura is a tiny little white Cochin bantam hen.

Herd of Chickens?

Ooh, he has us all gathered together here....what will we do?

Crow, what else?

Cage Free vs Traditional

Cost of eggs debated.

Well, Duh

See this silly rooster? (Yeah, those are snow flakes blowing past him.) Liz' boss gave him and a couple of his brothers to us a while back. They were enthroned in the nice little chicken house Matt and Lisa gave us along with our old hens. Daily corn meal, table scraps and fresh water. Shavings on the floor, warm, and cozy, and nice for a birdie.

So what did he do? Try and try and try to get out until finally one day he evaded my hand and made it. Now he sleeps in a box elder tree with Mr. Fluff and wanders around in the snow all day. I feed them both next to the coop and he steals cat food but...... Sooner or later I will catch him, if the fox doesn't get there first, but I am calling him WD. (And not 40.)

Grace had her baby, a lively heifer. It was running around the barn when we got there yesterday (after all those barn checks). It would be nice to think we could make fewer extra trips to the barn, but now we have to start watching Zobaba, Booth and Magic, who are all due to calve in the next week or so. Then in February and March, watch out; sleep is probably going to be kinda scarce.

Have a nice, warm day!

Running Outdoors in the Dark

Both ends of the day, dagnabbit, and no choice about it. Thank the Lord for flash lights.

Last night we got done with chores fairly early. The boss was able to feed the cows from the wagon in the field so we could turn them right out at the end of milking. Thus I came to the house just as the moon was taking over sky duty for the night.

The sky was cobalt and gold with twenty jet trails stretched across it horizon to horizon. They were like a foggy fan, wide in the east, converging in the west, some wide and faded, some sharp and thin.

I puttered around building up the fire in the stove for overnight and soon I could also see live jets flashing among the contrails. Wow, there are a LOT of planes flying over this place. The phenomenon was much noticed and discussed on Facebook on a friend's page later in the night.

Then well after it was really dark (and I was lying in bed re-reading a Diana Gabaldon book) the chickens set up a fuss. I knew something had been bothering them as they have been trying to roost on the porch...this is not a development that I favor as they have been sending deer antlers, planting supplies and bottles of dry gas and chain saw oil treatment flying all over when they get up on the freezer. I ran out into the dark, barefoot with flashlight.

Not a sign of a thing, but the boss says possum. From the low key outrage they are expressing I'll bet he is right. Guess I need to put them back in the little coop.

Morning, still dark, back out to take Nick up to the run with his breakfast. Foggy, which is fine, as foggy beats rainy any day of the week and that was what was predicted when we retired last night.

I don't much like the dark, but one entertaining aspect is shining my flashlight down into the garden pond on the way in at night. Young froglets and crayfish trundle around doing what they do among the plants and sleepy gold fish. It is fun to get a look at their secret world.

***Incidentally the blog roll crashed this weekend. I have done my best to reconstruct it from memory, but if I missed you, please let me know so I can add you back in. Thanks!

Deadly Silence

For the past two summers I have let some weedy sumacs grow up in front of the big living room windows. They are ugly, but the convenient perch brings birds practically into the house. Not your usual feeder birds either, but secret denizens of hedgerow and tree. Warblers, wrens, catbirds, even what I think was a red-eyed vireo this year (didn't have my glasses on) come to the shady shelter of sumac umbrellas to peer into the house or glean busily, unaware of our watching. It is delightful to have them so close and yet not scare them.

However, as winter winds approach, the need arises to remove the danger of the weak, but woody stems of the sumacs lashing against the window and breaking it.

Thus pruning time arrives.

I was miserably wielding my brush nippers, deep in prickly things, a cloud of mosquitoes feasting on anything not covered with Off! when a hawk drifted in on silent wings. He quickly hid himself among the Virginia creeper and river bank grape festooning the ash tree on the other side of the driveway and vanished. Had I not looked up at just the right time I would have never known he was there. So quiet. So swiftly invisible. ..and yet such a big bird. I barely caught a glimpse, but he looked like a red tail. I finished my nipper work and trudged back around the house just as he swooped swiftly down over the driveway by the old kennel, sending the chickens scattering like spilled popcorn. They raced under the bushes, screaming their alarm.

Well, that stinker. No wonder he was being so quiet. He was stalking our tame flock. I was just telling the boss about it and he says the hawk has been around all week, sitting in the big cedars that flank the front porch.
Now we know why.
Dang.


(He was indeed a red-tailed hawk btw.)

There are Things Every Farm Kid Learns

Like you really can't carry an egg in your pocket. Even your shirt pocket. Even if you go right straight to the house. Go ahead, try it. I have.

An egg in your pocket that doesn't make it to the house has truly nasty side effects. Really.

I found a nice egg this morning hidden in the neatest little cubby among the straw bales that Liz had left from the fair. A little rectangular tunnel back between the bales, just a comfy size for a chicken, dark, and nicely padded. I could just see how very tempting it must be for a hen to snuggle down in there for her daily confinement.

In fact the crook leg hen was in there when I went to get a couple slabs of straw to bed Nick's dog house up for the cooler nights. She clucked at me in irritation, I grabbed the fat white egg that was sitting there...and stuck it in my shirt pocket.

I tended to making Nick's bed without mishap, other than that Nick wanted to be in the dog house when I wanted to stuff it with straw.....then I went to the stove to chuck in some of the nine thousand pound blocks of oak that the boss provided me for heating water. I am sure you are guessing what happened next.

But no, I have been, more times than I care to admit, that farm person will the ill-fated egg in the pocket. One time it was five eggs, but I won't bore you with the details of that debacle.

I set the egg carefully in the grass, filled the stove, and grateful for years of experience with the perils of egg production, sauntered in for breakfast.....with no egg, either on my face or in my pocket.

Rooster

Teri gave us this fellow a while back. We let him out of the coop to run around the other day and he is such a sweetie! He is still called New Roo for want of a better name.

Ta Da (the power of love)

The New Roo

Teri gave this guy to Liz. I like hearing his crow and he seems to like his lodgings in the new hen house with the striking hens. Hope he can talk them into laying us some eggs.

Brand New Chicken House

Sunday Matt and Lisa presented us with this nifty free-standing hen house. Liz and I moved the girls in yesterday and they seem to approve quite heartily. Nick showed the border collie's roots and origins by pointing it like any good setter might. He looked pretty funny out there on the lawn, front paw curled to his chest and tail gently waving. He is so fascinated by the hens that I have to remind him what he is out there for.

Update...we have lots of snow, it just doesn't show in this photo

A Chicken on Every Blog

James and the Giant......

Errr.....I mean Becky and the giant......egg. This egg was laid by Chick Pea, Becky's Buff Orpington hen. She only lays about one a week, but these massive double yolkers max out our old fashioned egg scale. On the electronic scale they each come out to 3.7 ounces, a full 1.2 ounces larger than a jumbo egg.