Introducing a New Blogger: Nora

My six year old daughter Nora will now be posting on this blog. We will share the work at first, but my hope is that she can take over someday (these fingers are tired!).

Meet the New Chicks

Here are the new ladies within hours of their arrival they were already eating, drinking and sleeping. 
More pictures below:

Cornelia (Nellie), Barnevelder

Barbara, Barred Rock

Briana Rose (Rosey), Easter Egger

Amelia, Easter Egger

Adding to the Flock

With the decision to not sell the house and the new fence for the chickens, it took no time at all to order a new set of chicks.  We were able to get them before it was too late and only had about a week to wait before their arrival.  Thank goodness for that because our 6 year old asked about their arrival about 5 times a day. 

We ordered this set of chicks from a different company than the first set of chicks- Meyer Hatchery.  They would arrive on Tuesday, August 6th from Ohio.  We originally thought we'd get three chicks, but ended up getting four.  This will bring our total number of hens to eight.  This time around we thought less about production and more about color.  We wanted some pretty hens with pretty eggs. 

Here's what we chose:

One Barnevelder Hen.  This is a Dutch breed that lays dark brown "chocolate" colored eggs.  It is also a very pretty bird with a black head and neck and a gold laced body and tail.

One Barred Rock Hen.  This hen is a black and white and lays brown eggs.  We chose this hen to replace the little hen we lost from our last flock.  The barred rock is thought to have been bred from a Dominique hen so they share the same kind of coloring.

Two Easter Eggers.  Easter eggers come in all different feather colors, have a muff and beard and lay green, blue, or pink eggs.  We're excited to see what color feathers and eggs our hens will have!

Making a Greener Pasture

We've wanted to add more hens to our flock for some time now, but were delayed in this as we attempted to sell our house.  We eventually came to the conclusion that it was not time to sell and thought about how we might make our current 1/3 of an acre work better for our current hens and a possible flock expansion.

It turns out this was pretty simple.  We purchased 200 feet of farm fencing from Tractor Supply and spent an afternoon hammering in stakes and putting up fencing in the yard.  The girls now have a significantly larger area to roam around in and surprisingly have NOT destroyed our grass! 

The ladies free range all day, from 6am till 8pm.  They know to head back to the coop in the evening and have found some nice spots to hide when predators (mainly our resident red tail hawk) are nearby.  The first couple of days I thought for sure I'd come home to four dead or missing hens, but it turns out the ladies are pretty good at taking care of themselves. 

We've enjoyed watching them in the evening as they chase bugs and run around.  They are so tired at the end of the day that they often will come over and sit on my lap to have a pre-bed nap. 

While we were not able to sell our house and purchase something else with more land, we are finding that our little 1/3 acre in suburbia is turning out to be just perfect for us and our flock.

Some Words on Molting...

What did we do before the days of googling?  Even my 5-year old is familiar with the phrase, “let’s google that” and repeats this often when Mom and Dad don’t have an appropriate answer to her question.  A word of warning folks- do NOT let your 5-year old google on her own.  Lots of dangerous stuff out there!

As our hens arrived at and passed their first birthday we attentively watched their egg production wondering if those girls might loose some momentum.  When Jane, my daughter’s new favorite hen, didn’t lay for several days I started to get nervous.  For those of you who don’t know me, I get nervous at just about any out of the ordinary behavior.

Then came the feather loss.  It started with a few scattered around the run, then followed with large patches of feathers everywhere!  Not to mention the usual dominant protective behavior that Jane once exhibited had since retreated for a very stittish, run for your life sort of survival technique.  Jane just sits around in dark corners most of the day, head tucked into her neck, tail down.

 Views inside the coop and just outside the coop, that is a LOT of feathers!!

You can imagine the worry that set in.  What is going on with Jane?  I googled just about everything.  Was she egg bound?  Mites?  Something stuck in her crop?  I meticulously cleaned the coop- no sign of buggies.  I checked her bottom to feel for eggs- no such luck there.  I fed her water with oil in it- she didn’t appear to have any problems producing poo.

Thank goodness for the art of blogging.  On a desperate search for some help I came across this blog post: http://mayalassiter.com/2009/09/this-chicken-is-molting/

YES!  This is our Jane!  Well, minus the laying eggs part…  Upon further research I discovered that actually it is totally normal for all chickens to go through a molt in the fall when the days get shorter.  They usually do not lay during this period and the amount of feathers they will loose varies from a few here and there to almost a fully naked body. 

Jane, missing almost all her neck feathers...Eek!

Here is Alice at the beginning of her molt- mostly feathered, but definitely missing some tail feathers.

I was so relieved to figure out that this is normal behavior.  When my favorite hen, Alice, stopped laying eggs and dropping feathers here and there a few days later I was comforted in knowing that this was just a molt.

Jane's neck feathers starting to return, this is a couple of weeks after she lost her neck feathers.

I can now see on both Jane and Alice the signs of new feathers coming in on that bald skin.  What an interesting thing to watch!

Here is Alice, she lost all her tail feathers, but the new feathers are now emerging.  Poor Alice looks a little like a teenage chicken again!

I hope that our own googling will someday help comfort your anxiety about a near naked chicken, happy hen keeping!

Favorite Chicken Treats

I apologize for not posting in a while. I’m afraid there isn’t much to report! All the ladies are doing great, enjoying life and even getting into a little bit of trouble. I thought I’d take some time to mention 2 treats that our ladies love. The first is yogurt. Yup, plain old yogurt. No sugar or flavorings added, just spoon it onto an old plastic lid or in a shallow bowl and watch your ladies gobble it up. It is a delicious and also healthy treat as the probiotics in the yogurt will help your chickens digestive tract the same way it is so good for humans. This is my daughter’s favorite thing to watch because Alice (our beloved Speckled Sussex with unusually large waddles) gets yogurt all over her chin/waddles and then shakes her head spraying yogurt all over everyone and everything in sight. We then watch as the hens eat the yogurt off of each others backs where it has been sprayed from Alice’s chin. Certainly this is something worth trying with your chickens if you also have a long waddled lady. Here’s a picture of our Lizzie (Delaware) and Jane (Black Australorp) devouring some yogurt. Notice Lizzie’s beak is covered in yogurt- yogurt is her personal favorite!

Also of note is another treat, particularly good for hot days. I first discovered this treat on a hot summer day when all my ladies were panting. I tried putting ice in their water, giving them fresh cool water, letting them hang out under a shady tree…nothing helped what seemed to be excessive panting. I read that chickens love watermelon and if you freeze your leftover rinds they will love to peck at them on a hot day. Viola! Panting problem solved. Those ladies pecked at that rind for over an hour leaving nothing but a thin green skin. Upon finishing they were cooled down and refreshed. Certainly we all eat watermelon in the summer and wonder if there is a better way to use those old watermelon rinds than just throwing them in the compost bin. Try freezing a few and see how your chickens like them. We always keep a good supply in the freezer for those hot steamy summer afternoons.

RIP Frances

We unexpectedly had to say goodbye to one of our hens this past weekend. What a sad thing for us, I’m tearing up as I write this…

We went away this past weekend for less than 36 hours and came home to find one of our favorite hens laying dead in the chicken run. We still cannot say exactly what happened, mostly because we are unwilling to perform an autopsy to determine the cause of death. We believe that Frances became egg bound sometime during the day on Friday or Saturday and passed early in the morning on Sunday.

Frances (Franny) has always had a more difficult time laying eggs. She was known to spend a few hours on the nest before laying her egg. This would make the other hens, who also wanted to lay on that particular nest, quite ornery. We think this was something genetic for her. That she would always have had trouble laying and that although we may have helped her in this case had we been home, there would eventually have come a day when we would not have been able to help.

We feel awful about her death. We are sad that we did not detect her “illness” earlier, that we left for the weekend thinking everything was fine, that we were not attentive to the signs she may have been sending. Mostly we feel sad for our daughter (it was her favorite hen and the only one who would sit with her) and for the other hens (they have clearly noticed her absence).

We feel blessed that our daughter was actual prepared for this event in a dream on Thursday evening. She told us over breakfast on the Friday morning before Frances died that she had a nightmare in which “mom and I found one of the hens dead in the run”. When I asked her which hen it was she said it was Frances. The following days were filled with discussions about what dead hens look like, why things die, etc… I believe this was God preparing her little heart for the ache it would experience later that week.

I spent the day after Frances’ death comforting our daughter and helping her to move on. I also worked on cleaning the coop and run top to bottom, just in case it had been a case of worms or mites that killed Frances. I’ve added Diatomaceous Earth to their feed and throughout their run and coop, hearing that this is a natural remedy for worms.

Our daughter is already talking about getting a new chick to replace Frances, to which our reply has been- let’s wait for the other hens to settle in to their new life as a set of four. We did plan on getting more hens someday, but it seems too soon to add to our flock. We’ll have to see how the next few weeks and months go.

We are slowly recovering from our loss, but we will always feel like something/someone is missing. Frances was the sweetest hen, our little lady and friend. Thank you, Frances, for being a part of our life, even if only briefly- we have been blessed!