life on the farm

This is the saga of the unexpected chicks.
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3 eggs are pipped! and I have to go to work! No fair!

Hopefully will have chicks when I get home. Hubby will be here to keep track of the proceedings. I’m going to hate not being here!

I’m so surprised … I was really happy to see 1 egg pipped, then when I showed the kids, they pointed out 2 more I totally missed!

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Okay, I was really starting to panic when I read about the first-time mama hens not caring for their babies and letting them get cold and die … hubby called and I immediately requested a chick update! LOL

He went out and checked, and there is a DRY FLUFFY brown chick under mama hen, and another chick hatching RIGHT NOW … I am so wishing I was home instead of at work today! It’s going to be a LONG day … he has a bunch of stuff to do, and I’m requesting photos and phone calls every hour … LOL I love my hubby!!

Brown chick … is it possible that we got one RIRxRIR chick? I have two roos (RIR and dark silkie) and a bunch of different hens, but the only hen that was brown when she was little was my RIR.

Okay, I found my list, here’s what I have:
8 Araucanas (EE)
4 Black Australorps
3 Buff Orpingtons
2 Rhode Island Reds (1 is a roo)
2 White Rocks
1 Barred Rock
1 Bantam Silkie (roo)

The chick came from a brown egg, not blue, so … maybe?
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As of last update, we have a brown chick from one of the darker brown eggs, and a ‘gold’ chick from one of the lighter brown eggs. No news on other eggs cracking yet, he was going to leave the hen alone for a while and let her do her job, since she seems to be okay with sitting on wiggly eggs and wet chicks!

A few days ago:

Knowing what kind of hens I have, does anyone know what kind of egg each of those are? Except the blue one, of course!
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Now THREE chicks (a dark but still wet chick from the blue egg) and the fourth egg is cracked and starting!

If the two eggs that were laid 4/4 are the two that are left, they are sure going “by the book” here!
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They’re real!!

Didn’t investigate the other eggs yet, mama is finally to the point where she will peck! LOL She’s been soooo good natured about all the fussing and moving so far. Waiting until the kids get home from school to check the other eggs and get a better look at the chicks.

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I was so jealous that hubby was here to see this and I was at work:

But then while my kids and I were waiting for a barely pipped egg to hatch, we peeked under mama and saw this:

The egg that had been just pipped only about an hour earlier, was already hatched out and a damp reddish-yellow chick was drying … and the 5th egg was opening up with a little black chicklet inside!

Plus, the 6th and final egg was pipped.

Going out to check and see how 4, 5 and 6 are doing!
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Chick 1 — reddish brown, dark brown egg: RIR x RIR ?
Chick 2 — gold with black flecks, feather foot! light egg: Silkie x ?
Chick 3 — brownish, blue egg: RIR x EE
Chick 4 — light brownish, light egg: RIR x ?
Chick 5 — black with buff chest, dark egg: RIR x Black Austr. ?
Chick 6 — light color, light egg, struggling ??
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Chick #6 made it … looks just like #2 … tiny feathered legs!

All six made it through the first night too … very amazed!

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Thanks everyone who responded … I still can’t believe all six hatched! It is amazing to watch them just totally figure out the eating and drinking on their own, and the ladies at work are lovin’ the pics!

Posted in freelief
Tags: chickens

chickens can’t skate

They can’t. I cannot express in words how funny it is to see a chicken attempt to fly rather than walk on ice. They can’t fly, either. The only thing less graceful than a flying chicken, is one attempting to walk across ice.

I spent the first part of my day off work cleaning out horse stalls. A dreadful job any day of the week, but particularly foul when it is cold and wet, and stalls are flooded, and the scraping of the shovel against the rubber floor mats creates this brown sludge that cannot be defined. To make it even more pleasant, the stalls had not been fully stripped and cleaned in weeks, as we haven’t shut the horses in the barn due to the unseasonably warm weather. That is, until Ma Nature dumped a few inches of rain on the existing deep mud, and topped it off with a solid half inch or better of ice.

When you walk across this, you can see water moving below the ice and above the dead brown grass. It is treacherous walking. It is even more difficult pulling a giant dump cart meant to be attached to and hauled by a garden tractor, full to the top with cold manure slop. Did I mention the two flat tires? That is why I married a big strong man. I shoveled, he dumped. It is a good partnership.

Three clean stalls later, I realized that the chickens weren’t coming in from the coop to the horse barn for treats. I went out to the coop to add another layer of wood shavings to their bedding, and couldn’t even get them out of my way to do that. It was then that I got to watch my first “chicken meets ice” incident.

One hen hopped right out of the coop onto the ice and went skidding and flopping like a fish out of water. She may have not turned visibly red, but I know an embarrassed chicken when I see one. The rest of the hens were a bit more wary. One tried very unsuccessfully to fly straight to the horse barn. Remember: chickens can’t fly. What they can do, is flap miserably for a few seconds, just above the ground, and then crash viciously to the unforgiving ice below, slide skidding and flopping (again, like a fish) and attempt take-off once again into the slightly more graceful act of “flying” … it took about three cycles of this before the hen made it to the ice-free barn aisle. The others looked around at each other and me like, we really don’t need the extra chicken candy, thanks anyway.

So my next half hour was spent making a chicken sidewalk. I raked and scraped and shoveled the dirty hay and manure dust and various dry litter from the barn aisle and hay storage area floors, and sprinkled it along the quickest route from the barn to the coop. A skid-safe path for my little friends. Then I tossed out their candy (scratch grains) and let them enjoy picking through the wood shavings in the newly cleaned stalls. They do a great job of spreading out the horses’ bedding for me.

I’m sorry, this blog really needed video, and I didn’t get any. I hope I did a good enough job of painting the visual for you.

(Chicken photo above is our bantam silkie mix cockerel, Fluffy.)

Posted in freelief
Tags: chickens