E's flock - chicken math is real! (and working towards sustainable meat bird flock)

[imacowgirl2]

Put the first 20 eggs in the incubator yesterday. Mostly California White with a few Australorp, which will be the first round of young chickens for the 4-H shows this summer.

In other news, with winter storm Elliot, we had to move the roosters into the garage —so glad we bought all those dog crates last week! I went out first thing this morning and the one of the leghorn boys was visibly shivering and the other one looked cold and miserable too. Got them moved into the shed, but they still seemed cold, so we moved them into the semi-heated garage (about 37* instead of 2-3*). About an hour later E went out to collect eggs and noticed the rest of the boys looked cold, so we brought them in too. Looks like Truck and both leghorns suffered some frostbite on their combs, and one of the leghorns must have dipped his wattle in the water, because it’s now black like it’s frostbitten too . About noon I noticed on the camera that one of the leghorn hens was shivering, so we set up more crates and brought all 6 Leghorns/California White hens in too. Keeping a close eye on the rest, it’s maintaining a temp of about 10* in the hens coop, and it is 2* outside.

 

[imacowgirl2]

Candled the eggs for the second time today…this time we could see blood vessels and moving chicks! It was so amazing to see them moving around! Unfortunately looks like we probably have about 5 non-fertile California White eggs, and we couldn’t see anything in the brown eggs — so hoping they are developing and we just can’t see it vs all 6 of them being infertile.

 

[imacowgirl2]

Wednesday January 11 the chicks hatched — 11 total, 7 California White and 4 dark ones.

One of the dark ones has a head spot, which is a sex-linked Barred Rock/Cuckoo trait, so we aren’t sure what happened there, whether B14 is a Blue Cuckoo Marans instead of Australorp/Blue Star, or a fertile Barred Rock egg somehow got in the incubator. The other three appear to be Blue Australorp.

Today the chicks are 2 days old…and already we have some wing feathers coming in!! Amazing what a difference raising them with a heating pad in a cool environment makes! Everyone is nice and peppy and has figured out the water, food, and mama heating pad. Today we also provided Sav-A-Chick electrolytes just to give everyone an extra little boost. Tomorrow we switch them over from paper towels to pelleted bedding.

Tomorrow we will be re-doing the rooster coop barriers so that we can get roosters with hens again, as we need to get our Buff Orpington babies hatched.

20 meat chicks will be arriving on Wednesday from Freedom Range Hatchery. My hope is that this is the last order I will need to place — by the time we are ready for the fall babies, my hens should be laying.

I plan on keeping the babies separate from the others to start them on meatbird crumbles right away, and so I can track feed consumption and see how much I have in them for inputs.

 

[imacowgirl2]

Rooster coop revamp was completed yesterday afternoon and we now have two sides. There isn’t super easy access to the second side, so I really need to build a door, but it is working for now. 5 Buff Orpington hens are in with Goldilocks, the Buff Rooster.

I think once we are done breeding, I’m going to use that side of the rooster coop to raise my meat babies as well.

 

[imacowgirl2]

Meat chicks arrived today at 5:30am -- 3 days old, so I was worried about them travelling that long, but they seem to be doing good; lots of chirping when I picked them up, and I've observed most eating and drinking. There are a couple that I'm not quite sure about so I'm making sure to make all of them come out from under MHP every hour or so to eat and drink.

In other news some days roosters and daughters are a really frustrating mix! E just went out to re-fill the rooster feeder, and did not kick all the hens out of the run and close the run before opening the rooster coop. One rooster got past her and she lost all of them while trying to catch him, and it was a breeding frenzy. So we're now back to the point of waiting at least 4 weeks (to February 16) to set hatching eggs out of the australorps and leghorns...which puts us at March 16 as the earliest hatch date; we're getting REALLY close to being to the point of not being able to get our own babies hatched for 4-H birds for this summer. I'll have to do some thinking as to whether we need to go ahead and order a batch of chicks or if we think we can get them hatched.

 

[imacowgirl2]

Earlier this week we also added an easy-access nest box to the second side of the rooster coop, so we only have to go in one door to access it instead of 2.

 

[imacowgirl2]

Dude, the less dominant of the NH roosters is not wanting to stand today. Separated him into a cage in the shed; kicked the layer chicks out to the hen house to start integration, so that we had a crate for him.

The remaining 19 meat chicks are doing great. They sent us 21 in our order of 20, and we lost 2. Those little guys are CHUNKS— I had to pick a couple up today and they weigh more than the layer chicks that are a week older!

Truck is now in with his ladies again, for egg collection to start on the first again. Goldilocks was getting picked on by C01 and C02 when we put him back in, so we opened up the hen run to give them all room to figure it out. Definitely need to get a second breeding pen set up so that we can be rotating two roosters in and two roosters out. I was hoping with Truck being rotated out while Goldilocks was coming back in, and the NH guys being chill, things would be calm-ish…but they aren’t as calm as I would like, though in the scheme of things they probably aren’t bad - no blood drawn.

 

[imacowgirl2]

Just reviewed this thread…we are waiting until February 16 to set eggs — guess Truck just gets plenty of time with his ladies!

 

[imacowgirl2]

Dude still isn’t standing, beginning to think we may have to cull him And it also looks like one of the NH ladies might have an impacted crop. I will be checking it out in the morning, but it was VERY full tonight.

We took Trucks ladies back away so that we could use both sides of the rooster coop/run to re-integrate Goldilocks since things weren’t going great when they went back to coop for the night even though they had the hen run during the day. We put him and C02 together two days ago, so that the entire gang couldn’t gang up on Goldilocks, and added the remaining NH boy today since those two were getting along. In two or three days, if the three of them are doing well, we will put both groups back together since they are now a group of two and a group of three.

Once they are all back together, the meat chicks will be moved to the second side of the rooster coop. That means a door just moved up on the priority list, and I also want to change how the run is split, to make the section of run that goes with the small side of the coop the smaller section of run. Hoping since we’ve only had one super hard freeze this year that I will be able to drive one post…if not we’ll have to come up with plan B until the ground thaws. I also need to get some more wood chips in the run; they’re going to need it with 19 of them in there for about ten weeks.

 

[imacowgirl2]

Went ahead and placed an order from Ideal on the 19th for shipment on Feb 13th. Ordered 2 barred rock males, some Easter Egger straight runs in the hopes of getting at least one male, 2 brown leghorn roosters and 3 brown leghorn females.

These chicks will be about 5 days older than the batch of Buff Orpington going in the incubator tonight, so we should be able to brood them all together. With the exception of the last round of Australorp chicks, this should round out the hatching of layer breeds for this year. We will hatch out two more small hatches of meat chicks and one or two larger hatch of meat chicks later in the year.

Current group of layer chicks looks like 3 roosters and 4 hens of Leghorns, and 3 Australorp hens and the 1 barred rooster.