From Babies to Beasts

The baby chicks are no longer sequestered! They have joined the others on Tuesday, they were a little apprehensive about leaving their side of the pen but we had one brave chick that tested the waters and the rest followed!  Today when we fed them everyone was mingling just fine.  No fighting at all except for poor Fiona, she is 9 yrs old and you can see she has some problems but seems to get along OK until one of the "teenagers" was picking on her.  They like to walk past her and peck her on her head.  It makes me so mad when they do that!!  They have no respect for the elderly! 😈🐔

We really need to clean out the coop and figure out what we are going to do for the winter.  The chickens are so messy!  And, I think we have too many to winter all of them in the coop. I also have to figure out how to keep the waterer from being crapped in hopefully we can get this done before it snows or gets too cold.  Last year we had winter sneak up on us and didn't get the waterer situation taken care of because I was always scrubbing poop off of the waterer!  That is a job I HATE!  Some days I wish we would ship the chickens off for the winter like we used to but that is not going to happen!

Baby Chicks Are Growing!

Here are our babies, they are scared of everything! I had to sneak up on them just to get this shot, otherwise, they run behind the shelter of the dog house and I keep going in circles trying to get a shot of them. So here are the pictures I did get through the fence.

 They are eating in these pictures. They are so little I just think they are so sweet I just wish that they would not be so skittish, but after all, they are chickens!  I would guess in the next couple of weeks we will be adding them to the flock. I really have too many and hopefully, a friend will help out and take a few off our hands.  More pictures coming as they grow!

The Coop

I thought I would post a picture of our coop!  It's very nice we have electricity so in the winter we have a heated waterer, lights and warming lamps to keep the chickens nice and toasty. We have a 30' x 10' enclosed pen.  We did section off the end of it and built doors so we now have a nursery for the baby chicks, we also put a dog house in there for shelter.  The chickens love it!

The Boys

Here are two of our roosters, Goldie is the big black one and Francis is our banty rooster. So far Goldie is still being nice, in other words, he has not attacked me YET! We have 4 more roosters to add to the mix this should be interesting.  We have had a total of 7 roosters in the past and believe it or not they all got along of course the boss of the bunch was a little banty rooster named Spike he was my favorite, unfortunately, he died this past fall.  All we found of him was a wing.  RIP little man you were so loved!

Hot Wallowing

A picture of our teenager chickens....it’s 90 outside and the are all piled in a wallow hole that just doesn’t look like it’s very comfortable not to mention how hot it would be!  I just love watching them they are so entertaining beats the heck out of watching TV!

Long Time Coming!

It's been a long while since I've posted, actually years!  Well, I'm back with a whole new flock!  Pictures are coming soon!  None of the chickens that will be pictured are related to this flock.  The old ones are R.I.P and a new bunch has taken their place!

I lost my favorite rooster this past fall.  Spike was a Mille Fleur d'Uccle Bantam.  Many tears were shed for this little guy he was my everything!  I would love to get another one but I'm afraid that it would not be the same.

We do have some new chickens though, I ordered two Lavender Orpingtons which are just beautiful!
I also ordered two of my favorite breeds, a Silver Laced Wyandotte and a Golden Laced Wyandotte.  I named them Holly and Dolly. We did have a Chocolate Orpington but she passed away last week, she was a beautiful chicken!

I have babies out in my garage, I ordered Black Copper Marans, unfortunately, something got four of the nine. We have to reinforce the pen better so that doesn't happen again.