Chick has Chickens

As you know it all started by Rhiannon and I wanting to hatch some eggs. Maybe if we could have got the original incubator at the original time none of this would have happened... maybe.... Then the plan was to hatch a few eggs from my friend's flock and give them back to her as chicks.

But that isn't how it happened. By the time we got an incubator, my friend's rooster was gone and the last viable eggs past their 'due date'. And by then, I wanted to hatch a lot of eggs and raise some chickens to eat. And somewhere in the back of my mind at some time (I don't remember when - it just sneaked in there, very stealthily) came the idea of keeping some of my own chickens to lay eggs. And then when I called a place to buy some eggs for hatching, it turns out she was going out of business (moving) and was selling her flock. So in addition to having some 20 of her eggs in my incubator, I bought 8 of her chickens. There are 5 Silver Laced Wyandotte hens and a rooster of the same kind and two Buff Orpington hens. Isn't the rooster pretty? I love him! I am sitting a little on pins and needles hoping my neighbours don't hate him... At first he only crowed a little bit and not until I let them out of the coop in the morning. Now he crows inside the coop at 6am or so and he crows heartily when I let him out. I love the sound. I think he has an awesome crow - rich and expressive. It is a total cock-a-doodle-doo.

The black and white one with the most white on in this picture I named Lacey. Rhiannon has named one of the brown ones Pinky (she's missing some feathers on her back and you can see her pink skin) and the fluffy brown one Brownie. The other 4 black and white hens are very hard to tell apart - she is struggling to come up with names for them. I think Prickly was a name for awhile....





So eggs. Yes, we have had eggs already. Although it will take a week or two before we are in full production after the stress of changing homes. But someone has laid an egg almost every day - she lays it outside the coop - just a perfect little egg sitting there in the dirt. I popped two of them into the incubator and now we are collecting them to put under one of the broody hens so she can hatch some chicks herself. Then she will happily look after all the chicks I hatch indoors and think they are her own. Yesterday someone else laid an egg in the egg box, too.


All this chicken getting and coop finishing happened while Dean was on the road. Rhiannon was so excited to show him the chickens when he got home. And he likes them. (whew!) She has been wearing overalls since we got them and I call her my little farm girl. At dinner she announced to him that he is a farmer now... LOL! Well, maybe not quite! But as it happens, he's married to a farm woman (farmeress?) and the father of a farm girl!

So there you have it, Chick has chickens!