My friend has a large mixed flock, her roo is a French blue copper maran and she has a bunch of different breeds and mixes of hens: Australorps, ameracauna, barred rock, blue copper maran, buff brahma, Cochin, golden laced Wyandotte, and some I don't recognize like a flighty small black hen (not...
Hello! My very first ducklings are hatching today, they are from mixed breed eggs I won in a raffle.
Three are already out (and adorable), three more are zipping, and then one I thought wasn't doing anything until one of the newly hatched chicks bumped the egg enough for it to roll over and I...
I bought a duckling and some chicks from a woman who was ill and couldn't take care of them any longer. She told me the chicks were 2-2.5 months old but they have got to be 4 weeks olds tops. The duckling she told me was 4-6 weeks old. I don't know ducks so I'm not sure at all if she's correct...
Hello!
My first successful broody hen Hatched her babies out around the 30th of March, so they are about 4 weeks old. She still covers them up at night and doesnt seem annoyed at all by them during the day (they are isolated in a pen together, away from the main flock), but she just laid an egg...
Ok, so I'll start this question with a quite unbelievable story, but my actual question is the last paragraph so skip to that if you aren't interested in reading my chatterings: I had a hen sitting on a clutch of seven eggs, but I left her in the favorite nest box, shame on me. Other girls were...
Hello! I have a BO hen who's gone broody, I gave her 6 eggs to sit on and marked them all (I didn't want to move her to a seperate broody pen after a bad experience with my last broody). Naturally, she's in the favorite best box. Once a day I pick her up and check under her and she will usually...
I know that hens have yolks of varying sizes and at different stages of development growing in them pretty much all the time. But when a hen catches the broody bug, what happens to the undeveloped yolks inside of her? Perhaps does her body absorb them to use to help bridge the nutritional gap...
I have a hatch going on right now, so far ten chicks and 9 pipped eggs out of twenty set, woohoo!
BUT I have one egg that I discovered had a hairline crack when I candled on day 7. I put a piece of clear scotch tape over the crack to seal it and it developed fine. It has now pipped, directly...
atched 15 chicks from my buff Orpington flock on Saturday, Feb 20th. One needed a rescue because I shrink wrapped him accidentally when my hygrometer started falsely reading 95% and I tried to get rid of some of the not-actually-high humidity (Lesson learned). The chick I saved was the last to...
One of my buff orpingtons went broody Feb 3. After three nights staying in the nest box I figured she was serious about it so I moved her to a brooding pen and gave her some fertile eggs. She's been sitting great since. HOWEVER, other than the first day she was in there, I do not believe she's...
I'm very new to hatching eggs, in fact nothing has hatched yet, but I have 9 eggs under a broody (4 days along) and 19 in and incubator that are 9 days in. I can see active little squirmy embryos in all the incubating eggs, but one has a strange shaped air cell, it's more on the side than the...
Hello! I have seven buff Orpington girls who've only been laying a month and one decided to try out brooding yesterday. She had only one egg under her and as I was so excited about her being broody, I snuck seven more under her last night. She stayed sitting until this after when she got up and...
We are trying to create a sustainable flock for meat and eggs, because I hate having to keep paying for chicks, and after careful consideration we settled on Buff Orpingtons. I'd like to start a breeding program in the spring. I have read so many breeding plans and I *think* I know how to go...
I have 4 Red Ranger pullets who just started laying light brown eggs about a month ago. The one who started laying first, and who lays extra large eggs, has now started laying pure white eggs that seem slightly rough, like they aren't getting finished properly before laying. The shells seem to...
We have 3.5 month old red ranger pullets. One of them pooped this this white mucusy business this morning.
There's so far no other signs of illness, they all look and are acting normal. It was hot as the dickens yesterday and I gave them a pan of ice water to play in and I know they drank...
Ok, I have 15 white Leghorn (and one golden laced Wyandotte) 1-week old chicks in my brooder. They have chick starter available to them 24/7, plus a few times a day I give them a little scoop of fermented feed which they go crazy for. Yesterday I noticed two of them doing the cute little dust...
Hello!
We're new to chickens, but raising them seems to have already taken over our lives!
We started out with 13 day old red ranger chicks (for meat) + a free Egyptian Fayoumi that we got April 2015.
We ended up with 9 cocks and 4 pullets (and the fayoumi turned out to be a roo too). We...
Hello!
My husband and I are big fans of making stuff out of whatever we have lying around before we'll ever buy anything (much to the chagrin of our neighbors who have to look at our, uh, 'unorthodox' designs! )
We recently raised Red Rangers for meat (saving the 4 girlies for eggs for awhile)...
Hello!
We are five weeks in to raising our first chickens so we are really flying by the seat of our pants. We are raising Red Rangers for meat, and since we knew we'd only have them for 12 weeks or so and in decent weather (ha!), we only built them a tractor. Fortunately for the lakes and...