Fox Field Farm Flock

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Yeah, I'm a nerd all the way too.

We use to have a Canary (as in White Canary) and Snart also. And just for a little bit of Lord of the Rings we had a "My Precious".

 

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And finally, the last of my photos. Yeah, I do tend to take a lot, but that's because the chickens just won't stand still so out of a couple hundred these are probably the best I have.

Dominator, flapping his wings to stay cool. It was warm that day and many of the chickens were panting and holding their wings out. Dominator flapped his wings more then usual, so I'm assuming it was a way for him to keep cool without loosing his "cool". Roosters care a lot about their tough appearances.

Bubs in the sunlight, showing off his golden feathers.


Rip, foraging in the grass. He wasn't so sure what to think about the camera and was eyeing me funny.


Denali, feeling the affects of the warm weather.


Sedgie (Sedgewick). She was suppose to be a rooster, hints her name, but I'm fine with her being a hen. She's a Grey Dorking.


Rory, one of Bub's boys. I think his mother might be my Splash laced Red Wyandotte because his feathers are rather diluted compared to his brother or sisters.


My two black hens, Mrs. Potter the Jersey Giant and Andi (Andalasia) the Andalusian. I'm not sure which is the mother of Agent, but I have a feeling it was Mrs. potter because of his larger size.


Eagle, my Easter Egger, showing how her feathers on her neck tend to be ruffled like she styles them, even when no wind is blowing. They just naturally look like this. I think she's showing off to Bubs because of his golden locks.

Ruby, my Pyle colored "Dalmatian Bantam", sitting on her eggs protectively. I'm not quite sure when she is due to hatch them, but I believe in a week or so.


Another picture of Roshashannah as she watches me closely, making sure I'm not trying to chase her. Funny, I've never chased or grabbed her before and yet she seems to think I'm going to do so. That's a teenage chicken for you, they're so flighty.

 

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Just to explain some things before I post the updated photos (these are a few weeks old by now). Anyways, things have been going really well up until today, when I lost a little chick less then a day old named Celeb. However, I have a lot to be thankful for as finally a hatch went well. However, I still can't seem to get over 4 chicks per clutch (Celeb was the 5th). Another chick is hatching and though its siblings are a few days older I'm debating introducing it so it isn't lonely and so I don't have to raise it (the chicks seem to do better if parent raised because they get constant attention).

This is X, the little chick that hatched out of the egg marked with an "x". He is feathered out well and now perching with his mother in the chicken room, which is awesome as his mother, Eve, use to perch in the shed and I was afraid she would teach her son/daughter to do the same.


Princess is not actually with her four chicks here, though I sometimes get them mixed up. Agent (the black one) and Denali (the golden columbian) are both Susie's chicks so I'm assuming the two others are as well, as they tend to group with their own kind (though not always).


Here is a picture of Coulsen, who looks a surprisingly lot like X, which makes me wonder who their parents could be. Perhaps they will lighten with age. None of my adult roosters or hens are dark except Princess. I have a Silver Laced rooster and then a blue rooster and a black rooster that are two young to have been the father. All the other hens are white or white with black spots.


Turns out little Jean is actually a Gene (yeah, she's a he). Beautiful feathering growing in though.


Ruby while she was broody. A late freeze made the water turn to ice, hints why she can stand on it. Only part of it was frozen though, so they could still drink. If you look close you can see how her wings are barely spread and her tail is lifted high while her head is hunched low. This is how broodies run around when hinting the roosters they are already sitting on eggs and not laying at the moment, so they don't need to be bred.


I was attempting to get a good picture of Rory, but I guess this works.

He's my blue and gold columbian boy. And yes, he is a rooster, his comb is already going red (as is Agent's, Gene's, and Denali's). I'm guessing Rory's mother to be Scarlet, my splash and red laced Wyandotte. The father is obviously the Buff Brahma Bubs.

 

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Noel and Rain are turning into handsome roosters. Their father was a blue silke and their mother a pyle OEGB x silke mix. Noel has lovely lemon feathers growing in amidst the shades of blue while Rain is a miniature black silkie with no feathers on his legs.
I am writing this with one hand because I am holding a weak chick so I won't go on much longer. The poor guy, Lee, was an assisted hatch. He bled badly and later suffered hypothermia until he was stiff with his mouth hanging open and barely breathing. He seems to be dehydrated so I'm getting him to drink and trying to get him to eat. His mother screams and tramples her chicks every time I move her (from the A-frame to a small, safe crate that keeps her close to the weak guy).

I sure hope he makes it.

 

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Lee is still alive and thriving, up in my room with his brother, Aviator, after a predator got their mother. Pip Squeak was with me from the beginning, and it was sad that she had to go, but it turns out the two living in my room was good thing, as Augustus (formerly April) has joined them because of a partial paralysis in his legs. He can't stay with his mother during the day (only at night when they don't move around) but loves spending time with the two inside, following them around and snuggling with them even though he is twice the size of Lee.
I'm trying to get some more bantam breeds to mix in with my Dalmatian flock, but have to get rid of some of my chickens to keep the flock-count down. I have a couple hens and a large number of young roosters available, including Bubs. I don't want to have to butcher such perfectly fine roosters, but if no one takes them then we'll get some good meat for the diner-table.

Bubs in the evening light, watching over his flock.His hackles are a shimmering mix of purple, black and beetle green.


Dominator broke off one of his spurs and is so much happier because of it. He can finally walk without tripping over them! Now he just has to break off the other one. : )


Ruby with four of her chicks. The fifth, Augustus, is the one inside. They are starting to feather out nicely.


All my broodies are hatching chicks right now (I have around 11 broody hens and had to set up a lot of cages because of it). At first I lost two chicks because of other hens attacking them, but I started getting to the hens soon enough, early in the morning and locking the rest out during hatching, so that more injuries could be prevented. It was really sad. One chick was headless and the other was alive but with its entire skull exposed from being scalped. He had to be put-down. Wild Thing is doing well with two of her babies though, Izzie (the little dalmatian chick) and Gardener. They have our ferrets old cage. Gardener is a standard.


Here is Wild Thing on her nest, with her two chicks. The rest of her eggs are in the incubator, kept safe until they hatch and can be given to whatever mother will take them. Most of the hens will adopt chicks for a few days after the move.


Princess with one of her chicks, Spartacus, the other hiding beneath her (his name is Nestor). These two chicks are standard.


Nestor, hatched in the incubator, he took right to his new mother. By the way, that yellow thing is some scrambled egg I offered to the trio that live in my bedroom and didn't come from Nestor himself.



I'm not sure which chick this is, but it could be Koriand'ar or Wally, not sure which. The other two white chicks, Ivory and Finn, were never in that particular room, so I know it isn't htem.



Hope to update again soon. : )

 

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So, the last few days have involved a lot of broody hens hatching out chicks. Because the eggs got mixed up so often, all the hen seemed to have each others eggs in the end. Princess has three chicks (two standard and a bantam), Goldie has two chicks (one standard and one bantam), Wild Thing has three chicks (one standard and two bantams), Mrs. Potter has two chicks (two bantams), and Dodie has three chicks (three bantams). The remaining six broody hens are Dusty, Eve, Wynona, Posse (Posability), Susie and Scarlet. Scarlet was one of the first hens to go broody and is getting very impatient, but I ordered some chicks for her from a hatchery so they should be here tomorrow. She just has to hold on one more day.


Mrs. Potter inside the small A-frame. I put a mat inside of it for easy grip, as the floor was cement, and she seemed to like it very much. She also seems to be enjoying a chance to grow back the feathers she lost to overly-excited roosters.


Mrs. Potter after being moved to her new room, which space to roam around. She had her hackles up, that protective lady. Her two chicks are doing very well, though one fell out of the room and needed to be caught and returned to her. He did a real good job being quiet and still, so it took me a little while to find him with a flashlight.


Princess's three chicks, including Spartacus and Camp (Camp hatched while I was away at camp and my Mom was taking care of the chickens for me). This was when I was moving them because of how wet their crate got. I put them into a larger, drier cage.


Dodie with her three chicks.


Goldie's two babies, Starfire and Li'l Fan. They are in our home-made broody pen.


Princess with her babies, hoping to be moved (which she was). This is our dogs old crate.


Wild Thing with her three babies in a wet cage, before I moved her. She kept spilling the water, and the moist ground caused one of her chicks to loose two of its toes. Gardener and Izzie were the first two that hatched under her, while she was still in the nest box, the other was given from the incubator. This cage use to be a rabbit cage and was turned into a ferret cage by adding a guinea pig cage on top of it. Yep, now its being used for chickens. The circle of a cage's life.


One of the chicks (possibly Starfire?)


Dodie threatening my existence while I get a picture of her in her new, larger pen.


Princess in her new pen, an old rabbit/chicken cage positioned up off the floor in a concrete room.


Dodie in her old cage, one of our old ferret cages which we had in storage.

 

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So, there are a lot of chicks from a lot of sources tucked under my momma hens. Lets see if I can get it all straight. I tried writing it down, but even that can be hard to know if it is right or wrong.

Scarlet, my Splash laced-red Wyandotte, has three chicks. Tiger the cochin bantam, Sibs the standard Brahma mix, and Pool the Rosecomb bantam.

Susie (one of my Dalmatian bantams) has 6 or 7 chicks, I'm not sure because she hasn't stood up yet. There is Rivera, the splash chick, Black Pearl the black OEGB, Blue Beetle (a bantam of some sort), Velvet (black OEGB), Cleo the mix-breed bantam, Iris (a dalmatian chick) and possibly a blue silkie mix named Sapphire.

Possibility (white silkie) has 6-7 chicks as well. Tide, Beau and Nocturne are chicks from cackle hatchery, Resa is a dalmatian bantam named after a friend who has the same birthday. Mumbles is a blue-colored standard chicken (which I have no blue standard hens or roosters, so I guess we'll see what she turns out like), Grand Slam (a mix-breed standard) and possibly one other chick.

Goldie (Susie's Dalmatian sister) has Li'l Fannie (dalmatian bantam) and Starfire (standard brahma mix).

Wild Thing (Partridge rock) has three chicks. Izzie and Rowan are both Dalmatian bantams and Gardener is a Brahma mix standard chick. Izzie is also called "Toes" because she is missing two of her toes.

Princess (partridge silkie) has the standard chicks Spartacus and Nestor and the bantam Camp (hatched while I was away at camp).

Dodie (Dalmatian bantam) has three dalmatian chicks, Ivory, Koriand'ar, and Irons.

Mrs. Potter (Black Giant) has two chicks, Finn and Wally, both of which are Dalmatian bantams.

Eve (bantam mix) has 11 Dalmatian chicks. Three of them are yet to be named, but some of the names for them include Frodo, Daughtry, Tempest and Snow.

Dusty's eggs are yet to hatch.

In my brooder there is Vlad (a black silkie mix with vaulted skull), Arriette (standard chick), Speedy (standard chick), Delhi, Landon, Alley, Noir III, Tyke, Lefty, Arizona, CC, Ringo, and others. I also have a few chicks hatching in the incubator right now.

So, as you can see, its been both fun and chaotic around here. They have to have separate pens and even when in separate cages Wild Thing managed to kill two of Scarlet's chicks when Scarlet apparently through them out of her pen. I had to move Wild Thing and then put Scarlet in her old pen so I could put Possibility into her cage and Susie into Possibility's old cage as the other two crates were used to move other chickens and to hold Goldie and her two chicks during the night (to keep them safe from the skunk and her babies).
Dodie has to be given a ramp each day to get up and down from her crate, Princess is jealous of that (she lives next to Dodie in her own pen) and Mrs. Potter is in an entirely separate room in the barn that had a hole in the floor that let one chick fall through, so I had to crawl under a crawl-space to catch it and then put something over the hole.
The surprise 11 chicks got placed in Goldie's old cage with their mother, who is attempting to cover them. I put three of them in the brooder, then decided they wanted a momma so I put them under Wynona, who has such a serious phobia of chicks she tries to kill them, so I put them back with their mother, who excepted them right away.
Anyways, yes, broody hens do anything except what is expected of them. : )

 

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And here are the photos! Hope I can get all the names straight, because many of the chicks look similar and it is very confusing for me to know which ones are which. I'll give it a try though.






Iris, Mumbles and one other chick, either Li'l Mumbles or Landon. Iris and Mumbles both went out under mother hens, while the third went into the brooder to await a new home. Mumbles is the blue chick, hatched from a green egg, and is a standard Easter Egger mix. Iris is a dalmatian bantam mix (the chick with the black spot on her back).


The chicks in a basket while I change the towel in their brooder.


Nocturne, a silkie mix chick that got put out under a momma hen.


Eve's 11 babies, getting moved to a safe cage from the rafters of the shed.


Eve with her babies.


Alley and CC, both semi-assisted chicks that were freshly hatched and not ready to join the rambunctious brood in the main brooder. They spent most of the night in the incubator, safe and warm.


Scarlet with her three chicks, Pool, Sibs and Tiger.


Three of Possibility's chicks: The middle one is Sapphire, Beau, and one other chick, probably Velvet.


Mrs. Potter with Finn and Wally.


Wild Thing with Izzie, Gardener and Rowan.


And Princess with Nestor and Spartacus.

 

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So, I found a home for the 25 chicks that were living upstairs in my room, and was just ready to turn off the incubator with the dead eggs in it (I even opened them to see that they were dead) when a couple of the opened eggs proved to be alive. One, Zero, is hatched and doing well and the other, Tanner, is working on hatching.

Here are the chicks before they went to their new home. Vlad, Arriette, Speedy, Delhi, Mutter, Landon, Alley, Hood, Noir III, Tyke, Lefty, Fluffer-nutter, Arizona, Taiwan, CC, Ringo, Callie, Stitch, Lilo, Parsley, Turner, Paige, Champ, Bradley and Sika.

You can see here that some of them were older then the others (by the amount of feathering on their wings).


Here is Susie with her chicks, before she got moved into a larger pen.


This is Possibility with her eight babies. She has Tide, Beau, Sapphire, Resa, Mumbles, Grand Slam, Velvet and Midus.


Midus was a last add in from the brooder, as my Mom liked her a lot because we had held her while she was strengthening up after hatching. She is a Dalmatian chick, with a black spot between her shoulder-blades.


Here are two of Princess's chicks, Nestor and Camp.


And her with her last chick, Spartacus.


Scarlet enjoyed letting her chicks have their first dust-bath today. Her chicks are Sibs, Tiger and Pool.

Tiger is the one to the right. The other is Pool.


Dodie with Koriand'ar, Irons and Ivory, her three bantam chicks.


Goldie's two chicks, Starfire and Li'l Fannie.


A not very good picture of Mrs. Potter with Finn and Wally. Finn has the grey skin and is smaller.


Wally has a black spot on his shoulder.


Eve with her 11.


My teen birds, Roshashannah (turns out she is a girl), and Buttercream.


Wild Thing with Izzie, Gardener, and Rowan. The fourth chick in the picture belongs to Mrs. Potter.


Susie with four of her five chicks. She lost Black Pearl (poor guy) but the rest are healthy and doing well. Her chicks are Rivera, Blue Beetle, Cleo, Iris and Nocturne.


Rory, the teen rooster, with the two bantam tweens Sparrow and Ori. Both of them are dudes, but the littlest of their trio, Honey, is hopefully a girl. Ori seems to be Possibility's biological son.


Rory with Honey, the smallest of the tween trio.


Sight, not sure if he/she is a boy or a girl, but he sure acted like a dude a few weeks ago. However, his comb hasn't gotten much bigger.


X, Nat, and Sandy take the front with Spock, the sebright rooster, in the back.


Rip (the pullet) and X


Agent, my black rooster with some red leakage. He is a handsome boy, he might be my keeper instead of Rory, but I haven't chosen which yet. I want some fun colors from these roosters, and a roo that isn't aggressive either.


Zero, my new chick, which got to join Dusty's foursome outside. Dusty's other four chicks all look the same and are Sage, Rosemary, Clovis, and Tyme. Hopefully Tanner can joint hem as well.

 

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All my chickens are doing well, including two bantam chicks that were attacked by another momma hen. They are now back out with their mother, Dodie, and their sibling, Koriand'ar, and getitng a chance to forage for the first time.

I have two roosters to choose from as far as Dominator's "second in command". This would be laid-back and handsome Rory or the energetic and good breeder, Agent. Agent is black with red leakage while Rory took after his father, a Buff Brahma.
As far as bantam roosters go I have three adults but am trying to find a home for one of them (Dastan) while I keep Rain (a black silkie mix) and Spock (silver sebright) until more of my Dalmatian chicks can mature and take their place.

Ruby, my Red pyle silkie mix, is broody AGAIN and sitting on five eggs. Thankfully, some of the broody pens are freeing up. The only one without access to the outdoors yet is Dusty with her five, and that's only because she wast he one who attacked Irons and Ivory (Dodie's babies) so I don't trust her yet. She's a good mother to her own babies though, which is nice.
Princess has started to perch in the main chicken room again, though her trio of babies is having trouble keeping up with this and keep returning to their old crate. Mrs. Potter is now mostly ignoring her babies, she has even started laying again, but they try to follow her around all the same. I night I take them out of the nest boxes where they try to sleep and tuck them under their mother, which makes them very happy. They also sometimes follow Wild Thing around, hoping for some food and protection, since they look like her chicks.

All and all, the flock is enjoying the weather and doing well. I'll try to post some pictures soon.