Pipd's Peeps!

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Hello, welcome! Since my last thread was made specifically to follow the growth of my 2014 babies and I will not be getting chicks this year, I decided (with the encouragement of the followers of that thread) to start fresh with a new place to focus on my entire flock, including my beloved hens, the handsome rooster boys, the crazy Guinea fowl, and the cute li'l duckies.

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For full disclosure, this thread is subject to replies with picture overloads, crazy chicken lady stories, rants about broodies (or whatever else is frustrating me at the time!), and even sad stuff if it happens.

Oh, and Dorking cuddles. There will be lots of Dorking cuddles.

You have been warned!




Things that are crossing over from the last thread:

• My birds, of course! I have little blurbs about each one of them, along with their breeds and hatch dates (if known) on this page:
  
  My Flock!​
  I will try to remember to at least mention breeds with birds' names or pictures in my posts, but if I forget, it's all there.
  
  
• The great call duck incubation! I have 4 little call duck eggs from my pair in lockdown at the moment, due to hatch any day now! . Just as a side note, I've been referring to the eggs by their position in the incubator so that I can remember which one is which from the candling pictures I took, so I will probably call them things like 'Left Top' or 'Right Center' when posting about them.
  
  
• The Broody Brigade! Their numbers are dwindling at the moment. Just stubborn ol' Lady Wyandotte is still brooding, but I think we all know it's only a matter of time before another goes.
  
  
  
• Reuben the Silkie cockerel. I don't know if I'll mention him a whole lot, but he's coming to the end of his quarantine period soon, so who knows?

I think that's about it! I will reply with things as they happen, so there are no guarantees how often there will be posts, especially during the semester (mid-August to early May usually).

Please feel free to join in!

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And just to get the pictures and crazy-chicken-lady-ness started, here is a few favorite pictures of my splash Marans (and official mascot), Frou-Frou fuzzy. I'm crazy about all of my birds, but she really brings the crazy out. Love this bird!

Rest in peace, precious girl. . . . June 11, 2012 - August 21, 2015

 

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Happy Birthday!!!

Or, happy BIRDday, if you will.

It's Amaretto, Armada, Gluttony, Peanut Butter, Rosey, Feldon, Louis, Sumi, and Troll's hatchday (belated by one day for part of them, but close enough), so we had a chicken birthday party! Here are this year's cakes I used watermelon, cucumber, bell pepper, and a tiny bit of yogurt as always, plus zucchini, some of their feed pellets and a little scratch grains this time around. Two things I think worked out better this year than previous years are, first, the pellets! They bulked out the watermelon because they soaked up the juice, and the girls went nuts because they love soaked pellets. And second, zucchini! I actually think the girls might prefer zucchini to cucumber based on how they ate their cakes this year.

Some mini cakes for all the pens, too, of course!

I let Peanut Butter, Armada, and Amaretto at their cakes first. They were... unsure.

Then they realized it was food!

Yum!

Gluttony would have joined her sisters as well, but of course, she's in the broody buster! Here she is with her biological mother, Abra, eating their mini cake.

I showed Louis their mini cake before setting it in their pen. He puffed out to intimidate this new threat, of course.

Not to worry, Louis, Feldon, and Troll quickly surrounded that dangerous cake!

...Oh, wait, that's just food.

Vega and Altair were unsure about the cake for their pen, but birthday girl Sumi charged right through them and started to eat!

...And then she turned around and gave me this look like she wasn't satisfied with my offering.

Rosey, Buzz, and Russell got their cake, but Russ took over and hogged it until I made him share

And it wasn't just the birthday birds and their roommates who got a little something today Here's Gus calling the girls over because, gasp, he found a mini cake all on his own!

The girls were... not so sure about this thing, though

The OEGB cockerels were the same. Bunch of chickens!

Meanwhile, back at the main cakes, I let the flock loose once the birthday girls had had their share, and they went bonkers as always! Peanut Butter was not going to be intimidated away from HER birthday cake, though Love that sassy girl!

The cakes are nothing but a few millimeters of watermelon rind now, but I think the birds had fun for their once a year hatchday party. Here's one last picture of Peanut Butter, looking lovely as always, even though her wattles have yogurt on them and her chest is soaked with watermelon juice.

 

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The eggie report! We have two air-breathers!! e I went against my better judgement and quickly grabbed the other two out of the incubator to candle them (making sure that the humidity got no lower than 55% all the while!).

Left Bottom looks very underdeveloped. :/ It's still moving around, but it looks like it's around a week off of hatching. Not sure how that could have happened when it's been in the incubator under the same conditions as the rest. I'm keeping an eye on it for now.

Right Center ('RC') appears to be getting into position to pip, so I'm hoping it will catch up.

The two 'top' eggs, 'Crashie' and Right Top, are our breathers. They appear to be resting (pipping's an awful lot of work, after all...), but are still visibly shifting around when I shine the flashlight through the top of the incubator at them. e I had to leave the room to resist the temptation to get in there and help them, so I'm only allowing myself to check on them every so often. What can I say, I'm eager to meet the li'l duckies.

(Also... Apologies for the smiley abuse.)





In the mean time, I took a hand full of pictures while I was trying not to think about baby duckies. Here we go!

Trudi and Malcolm, the parents of the li'l call duck eggies. Believe it or not, I hosed out and refilled their pool this morning.

Guess who's rejoining the broody brigade? These bitty Sebrights are lucky they are so beyond adorable when they're trying to look like menacing broodies. Oh, Rosie...

Marama has taken it upon herself to punish the broodies for being broody. Because apparently, no one likes a broody. (Marama is a sassy little Fayoumi.)

A look at how the woods is opening up over the chicken yard this spring.

And Frou-Frou looking for a roost. Her face!

Edited to fix something...

 

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They are!!

I'm so in love with these little guys!




Here are the rest of yesterday's pictures! Roxy says she's having a sun bath, you got a problem with that?!

Here's her big sister, Abra, giving me looks. A few months ago, Abie injured the back of her comb somehow, so she now has a comb over.

Here's Crashie! She is absolutely thriving outside! She still yells at me when she hears me, but she loves playing in the mud and is going in the coop by herself most nights. Still haven't gotten her to figure out the steps to the pool, though!

Marka the Silkie is in here somewhere.

Mavis being fabulous

Roscoe, Abra and Roxy's dad, checking out what's going on. I wish the fence wasn't in the way, but he was being too adorable not to appreciate.

Here's an 'outtake' from Vira's picture in my last post. What a look!

Mavis again. She's so purdy!

Death by cuteness!!!

This is how Sylvie made up for giving me a hard time with her picture, I guess!

The last shot, here, is a couple of Dorks. That's Kita being a goof in the background while Myrna was trying to be serious and pose.

 

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I'm going to post these as thumbnails, so click them to view them closer.

Modern Game Bantams. They are way too cute. Most of them wanted to peck at me or my phone while I was taking pictures! Not in a mean way, more out of curiosity. This is a hen (I can't remember if she was Black Breasted Red or Gold Duckwing?) and a White rooster:




I could not get over this Birchen hen's eyes! All of the other Birchens had dark brown eyes, but she had these lovely orange-brown eyes!




OEGBs--I couldn't resist In order, this is a Blue Brassy Back hen, Blue hen, Blue Silver hen, two different Blue Wheaten hens, and a Brassy Back rooster (his face was so funny!!)




I didn't take many pictures of d'Uccles, but I absolutely fell in love with one of the colors there, a Silver Mille Fleur. I also grabbed a shot of a Gold Neck hiding her face in her food dish.




Call Ducks! I took pictures of the prettiest. First is an Appleyard hen who would not pull her bill out of her feathers for a better picture, then a Pied Gray drake, and the last two are of the same Snowy drake because he was a real charmer.




The rest are just miscellaneous breeds and such, so I'll do them individually. This is an Ayam Cemani hen that thought the lens of my cell phone camera was super shiny.




A Black Cochin rooster that puts the LARGE in large fowl!




Oops, I guess there is a repeated breed. This is a large fowl frizzled Blue Cochin hen




A Blue Light Brahma! Never heard of this variety, but she was gorgeous! I don't know what was up with her eye, though.




A Blue Sumatra hen That lacing!




A Buff Brahma hen getting into a dust bath. Because what else is there to do in these show cages? (Err, oops, yet another repeat breed )




I was so excited that they had some Colored Dorkings there!! Their color didn't come out very well in pictures, though, because there was a light right above them. But here is a Colored Dorking cockerel:




Red Shouldered Yokohama rooster, because he was handsome and he posed.




And finally, THIS GUY! I did NOT know there were frizzled Salmon Faverolles bantams! His BEARD is frizziled! Look at him!!




I also ran into @fishnet1971 there (not sure if she still gets on BYC or not). Good to meet you!!

 

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Well, it was a slightly warmer day today, warm enough that the snow was just a little bit melty and the hens were getting antsy from being cooped up. I figured I'd give them a chance to stretch their wings if they wanted to. The answer was a fairly resounding, "NO WAY!" They got this far and no further:

Perdita decided to take a bit of a stroll, however, and so while I was waiting for her to finish her walk, I, err got a little artistic with the snow.

We're due for ~4-6 inches of snow tomorrow, if I remember correctly? Anyway, the girls are just going to have to get used to being cooped up a little while longer.

 

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We're up to 3 eggs from Sybie! I was not expecting another so soon!!

I've decided to wait until at least the weekend before I set them, just to see if she lays any more in that time. If she's laying more consistently over the next few days, then I'll just wait a bit longer until I have 5 or 6 eggs and set them all at once. I'd much rather it if all the babies hatch out around the same time and are the same age versus the staggered hatch and having to integrate the babies.

 

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It's been a rainy, windy, miserable day, and to top it off, I didn't get a single egg tonight.

But, I did find this super cool leaf while I was out closing the coops for the night. Neat enough to share.

 

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Not sure what happened, but when I opened coops this morning, I found one of my pullets looking like she'd been in a heck of a brawl. Her face is swollen and bruised, her head partially scalped, and she was covered in dried blood when I found her. I'm like 90% sure she was completely fine last night, no one acted like there had been a predator attack yesterday, and the coop was closed up tight with no signs of predator infiltration, so it almost has to be that another chicken beat up on her. She's one of the pullets that Perdita raised and taught to perch, so she was up on the roosts last night. She was perched next to Trixie, who's a wicked little witch, and the injury is on the side of her head that Trixie would have been closest to... But Trixie has no blood on her, and I'm just having a hard time believing, even as wicked as she is, that she would do something like this. I really don't know.

For now, I've cleaned the pullet up and moved her to the brooder where the OEGB girls and Gwenyth were during that cold snap in January. She's in good spirits, appetite's good, she was preening herself, and her eyes, though puffy, both appear to be fine, so I think she'll be okay. She just looks pretty rough at the moment. Pictures in a spoiler for anyone that doesn't want to see them. This was after I'd cleaned her up as much as I could.

Spoiler: injury pictures