more chicken adventures

Our chicken adventures continue, though not exactly unhappily. Since the Unfortunate Incident Involving a Dog and a Chicken, Fanny’s buddy Clara has developed a bad (and painful to our other hens) feather-picking habit. We tried several well-researched things to try and get her to stop, including separating the three hens and letting the feathers grow back, but none worked even a little. Clara’s habit was engrained, and she then taught the same thing to another hen. That left one hen that could be integrated with new chickens, and then we would have had to wait for her to completely re-feather, plus for the other chickens to be the same size as her before integrating them. It seemed like we’d be better off starting over if we ever wanted to get up to 6 hens, and I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out what to do with three good layers that couldn’t live together in this situation. Thankfully, there was a solution: the nice guy who runs the farm & feed store where we got the ladies to begin with was willing to take them in to a couple of his mixed flocks, where such behavior would be better regulated under an established pecking order. I think that it was a decent solution, and I’m very grateful he was willing to do that. He went over all the causes of pecking, and not one fit our situation at all except for the trauma, and since that’s exactly when it started, I’m pretty confident it won’t happen again. The odds are against it, in any case. We’ve learned a lot over the last year, and we’d certainly do some things differently if we had to do it all over again, but we’re very happily committed to continuing. It has been a good experience overall: we love the eggs, their daily care is very easy, and we’ve gotten attached to their companionable clucking in the yard. Even Ivy seems to like them. With the price of organic eggs at over $4 a dozen, the savings don’t hurt either. Soooo, we drove back up to the feed & farm store in the pouring rain, said goodbye to Clara, Susan, and Marcy, and got six chicks!

They're a week old. Here they are doing synchronized waddling and peeping:

Aren't they cute? They're on top of our piano for the next couple of weeks, then they'll go out to the hen house in the garage along with the heat lamp.




You can probably guess who is most excited. The boys awake in their rooms until after 9 PM last night, they were so wound up. Ollie named the "chipmunk one" you see here "Queenie". No*ah had already decided to name two of them "Sukie and Polly" after the girls in the folk song. I named the rest Coco, Winnie, and Mabel. We continue to walk squarely down the fine line between pet and livestock, but naming them is just too much fun to resist. We got two of the same breeds we'd had, and a few new ones.


Queenie :Auracana (like Susan was; lays blue eggs)


Sukie and Polly: Buff Orpingtons (like Fanny was)


Mabel: Blue Cochin


Winnie: White Cochin

Coco: Cuckoo Maran (looks very similar to Clara, but lays chocolate-colored eggs)

We did some work last week (thanks, Ma*rk, St*eve, and K*athy) to make the run a little bigger and make both the run and dog kennel a little more attractive.

It feels so strange to go back there and not hear the ladies crooning at me, and even stranger to throw perfectly good food scraps into the garbage. The peeping from the top of the piano kind of makes up for it, though. The only thing that kind of sucks is that we won't have any more eggs till October at the earliest, but after that, we should hopefully be good for a few years.

J's cousin Christine and her family are getting chicks this week or so too. Her sweet kids are a lot older than mine, so I guess we'll just have to settle for having chickens the same age!