Recent content by AlGalMom

I have a 5 month old Blue Laced Red Wyandotte (splash) hen that just started (an hour ago) making this odd whining sound with each breath. She seems uneasy, but I can't perceive any other symptoms beyond breathing through her mouth. I've linked to a video of her so you can see her...

well, shucks. I was afraid of that.

Can't decide if this is a cockerel or a pullet. S/he is very calm & quiet, well feathered out, smallish comb, but those wattles make me nervous. Any ideas? More specifically, is there any way it *could* be a pullet? :)

Well, we have three Wheaten Ameraucana chicks...two of them have turned fairly brown, and I was wondering if that means they're actually roos (all the pictures I've found of Wheaten Ameraucana roosters show beautiful black and russet fellows....not at all cream colored like the hens, right?)...

We will be hopefully tripling or quadrupling the size of our backyard flock in the next few weeks (currently we have 2 hens, we're hoping the batch of chicks we have in the brooder will give us 4 to 6 more) and are in the process of converting our A-frame tractor into a stationary walk-in coop...

The last two days my 1 year old Golden Laced Cochin has spent the entire afternoon and on into the evening setting on the nest. We've just assumed that she was laying an egg, but after hours on the nest today there was still no egg. This morning there was an egg, but I assumed it was from our...

My birds' combs look just like your rooster's in the top picture. How did you treat it? Were you able to get rid of the infection? Thanks!

I'll guess Sept 30, 2011.

Here's one I just took. Not sure how well it shows up, but they are fairly speckled, although not really big spots.

We got her as a week-old chick--she is now about 20 weeks old and is still laying pullet eggs. I'm pretty sure she is a purebred BCM--the breeder had her pens very well laid out and kept the breeds segregated. And Henrietta looks exactly the way a BCM hen is supposed to. So....what kind...

I am a new chicken owner, and my black copper maran hen has been laying for about 2 weeks. We got a BCM because we'd been getting free range eggs from BCMs and they were such a beautiful deep brown--I loved them! Anyway, her eggs are definitely darker than the store-brand "brown" eggs, but...

I am a newbie to chicken keeping, and we have our first flock of four hens fast approaching maturity (they are about 18 weeks old). We have a very nice A-frame coop/tractor for them, but have not yet installed nesting boxes. They free range during the day and do not return to the coop until...

We are in Louisiana in the city. It looks like we will have, at most, one maran and two Cochins, and the floor of the tractor is 6x8. I'm hopeful that will be enough space--we followed the space requirements in Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens. Our maran is definitely the most active...

We are in the process of building an A-frame tractor/coop for our little flock of standard cochins & marans. They will live in it and it will serve as their run--as much as we'd like to free range them, we have too many free-range neighborhood dogs for that to be safe. We're planning to move...