Beautiful hens, sounds like the chicks will be lookers as well!It just dawned on me last night that Blue Mille Fleur X Blue Mille Fleur should act like any other blue crossing. So I checked the Kiplinger Chicken genetic calculator, and sure enough, BMF X BMF = 50% BMF, 25% MF and 25% Splash MF. Thus, the two blond babies I have are perhaps Splash Mille Fleur?! How cool is that?
Lucy has one Mottled, (under her peeking out), one BMF, and three MF (dark red/brown, light red and chipmunk!)
However, where did Ms. Chipmunk chick come from? Must be a deviation from MF?
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Ethel has one mottled, two MF (one dark red/brown, one pale red), and two blondie Splash MF? OR could the darker of the two blonds be a pale BMF??
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I have some Jumbo Cots. Where are you located?
Glenn County, a couple miles outside of Willows on 162.
We usually use hardware cloth as a buried floor screen or a well out of rich brooder 'lid'. If we use it as fencing, then on the chicken side we'll over-lay it with something else to keep them from poking through. I would tell you what we usually use, but I've just realized I don't know what it is actually called. It's from Lowes, it's green, kind of a sturdy plastic with round rolled edges? Hopefully you know what I mean? Anyway, he just overlays it with another small-opening that is offset by a bit so there's little room for them to poke any parts through. We ended up switching from using hardware cloth for anything much but the floors and lids now because it seemed to get brittle and start breaking off in dangerous, shiny, delicious-looking-to-chickens bits when we used it last time.How do you stop young chickens from hurting themselves on the hardware cloth. Almost every one of mine has at some time or another pushed their beak through the wire with such force that the base of their comb (like the bridge of the nose) bleeds a little. The latest was my CLB girl she bled so much that it was dripping off her beak for a bit. We put some neosporin gel and then some Veticryn on the bridge of her nose and she seemed fine after it stopped.
The weird thing is the bleeding didn't seem to bother her one bit. Her temperament and everything was unchanged she was her happy self. With her bobbing her head everywhere I was afraid she was going fling blood drops places but it quickly quit bleeding and you can barely tell now that she even did it.
So far she has bled the most of any chicken and it was only ran for a few drops.
Is there a better treatment?
