I am a proud owner of two roosters who get along quite well, and 16 beautiful hens who just started laying about one month ago. I am now up to 11 eggs or so per day. We are planning on selling our eggs at some point in time. I am a first time chicken owner. I have 5 brothers and sisters and a mom and dad who care dearly for me. My dad and I are the only ones who really take care the chickens so I can proudly call them my own. We live in Lakevill, IN.
I think we got our first 10 chickens in the early spring. Their was still a little snow on the ground and it got quite cold at night. Then a couple days later we got eight more, plus 15 boilers. I think we are doing well for first time chicken owne. We only lost one broiler and I'm still not sure how the poor thing died. Unfortunately I was not there the night it died and was very sad when I came home to it the next day.
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It's one thing when you butcher a chicken, but when it just dies like that... It was really sad. However the rest of the 14 were sucessfully raised to huge, 15 to 20 pound birds. They had only a little trouble walking around and when we delivered them at the butcher's place, I was proud to see ours were much bigger than the other chickens I saw there.
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We have sex-link chickens so they are not pure breeds but I can tell what they are crossed with. We have 3 buff orpingtons, 2 rhode island reds, 5 ameraucanas, 5 ISA browns, and one completly white hen that I have no clue what she is. Her name is Sharren and she's deffinately not a leghorn. She's all white with long, greenish legs, a high breast bone, yellow beak, and rose comb. She's the strangest of them all. One of our roosters is an australorp, I think. He's black with beautiful brown eyes and his feathers have a green tint to them when the sun shines on them. He was a big, black and white chick, mostly black. His name is Bear. Our other Rooster got named Ducky when he was just a cute little yellow chick. Now he's a good sized, white rooster. I would have thought he was a Leghorn if it wasn't for the few brown feathers he has on his neck and back. He might be an ISA brown too. The others i named are Marine (a black ameraucana with a white head and neck), Anne and Ellie (the ones who look like queens my mom says, with their golden heads and necks and back and gold bodies, two more ameraucanas), Cumin and Ginger (my rhode island reds, I can only tell them apart because Ginger's comb is all lopsided and Cumin has a little bit of orange streaks on her neck), Hawkeye (ameraucana who's face looked like a hawk when she was little and still does), Chip (Chip was named before we even picked out chicks and decided if we were getting any yet or not, he was a yellow baby with black spots on her back. Now she's a beatuiful light brown with blue feathers on her wings and back. She has the fluffiest "beard" yet.) One of the ISA browns is named Sassy because I kept catching her pecking at some of the chickens. She has the least white on her and the darkest brown head. There's also Rachel. She's our only Orpi with balck tips on her end tail feathers. A friend of our's wanted to name one of the the "blond ones" (what i used to call the Orpi's) after her cause she can be quite the blonde herself.
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As you can see I spend plenty of time with my beloved chickens and am enjoying it probably more than I should be, but hey, at least I'm having fun. Plus it gives me something to be rosponsible about during the summer while school's out. No one else seems to be as entusiastic about chickens like I am, at least, non of my friends or family are. That's why I'm here, to meet with others whom are just as estatic about raising chickens as I am.