cajun41887
Songster
My original flock came from Parrish General. 8 of the 10 were hens and 2 were roosters. We lost the Delaware rooster to the bobcat last year as well as the Delaware hen. Lost my Australorp hen (and my best broody) to the Fox last fall. I’d love to pump him full of lead. He also took an Orpington and several of my cockerels from that year’s hatch and one of my ISA brown hens. . Just in the last 2 weeks we lost one of our australorp crosses to a bobcat. Damn thing went right in the coop at night (hubby didn’t close coop door, he thought I had, I thought he had) and it scaled the 6 foot fence around the coop after going through several locations of our horse hot wire. We are on 6 acres and back up to a heavily wooded area. We’ve seen bobcat, coyotes, fox, raccoon and we’ve personally dispatched 4 male possums in the chicken run, coop or in our feed room in our horse barn in the last couple of months. Raccoons have never bothered our chickens and we have a few that are HUGE! Our bobcat “friend” is ginormous too. Height wise it’s abput the size of my male Australian Shepherd.I bought my chicks from Parrish Hardware! Took home 4 females, but one turned out to be a rooster. He was a gorgeous boy and I loved himI caught the fox with my game camera the next night, and dusted some powder in front of the coop door to see what came back - I picked up raccoon prints!! I have never, and I know this is weird, seen a raccoon here. I know they're everywhere, but I'm out at night with the dog and a flashlight! I've got an opossum my dog wants badly, but now it looks like I have 3 predators? I'm on 5 acres, 3 totally wild. Figuring out how to fence off a part for them is giving me fits, because I don't want to have to put in gates for myself where I walk 100 times a day. The plan is to get 25 +/- chicks and start over, but it's serious safety time. The war is on.
My list has a handful of breeds I'd like to try. What kind do you have?
I don’t have the ability to breed anything that would be a purebred since I lost my Delaware rooster and my australorp hen. My main rooster is an Australorp and he’s HUGE and friendly. All of my babies from last year are sired by him and the rooster we kept from last year is also huge. He’s an Australorp/Partridge Rock mix and has the pretty barring. Our third rooster is an Australorp/Sicilian Buttercup cross. All of our hens are brown egg layers with the exception of the buttercups, but I’m told the buttercup cross rooster if bred with a brown laying hen, the offspring will lay brown eggs. Our purebred hens are ISA Browns, Buff Orpingtons, Buff and Dark Brahmas, Golden laced Wyandottes, or Partridge Rocks. And the mixed hens are either Australorp mixed with wyandottes or Partridge Rocks or Delaware’s mixed with wyandottes or Partridge Rocks. There’s a chance one of my hens we hatched last year is a pure Australorp as she has a single comb and the proper coloring, but I can’t say for certain and she hangs out primarily with my Australorp/buttercup cross rooster so I wouldn’t be likely to get a pure breeding out of her.
I’m not sure how important purebred chickens are to you, but if it’s not terribly important, all the hens we’ve hatched out have been excellent daily layers of big brown eggs and all the hens with the Australorp as their father have gone broody and raised chicks for us. I have a hen who is just going broody now. We weren’t going to hatch any chicks this year, but if you want, I’m happy to set some eggs under her. I know it would make her happy. The other 3 hens were sitting on eggs for over a month before they finally gave up after the bobcat attack happened in the coop. I can tell who laid which egg and I know which hen hangs out with which roo so if you have a certain mix you’d like, let me know. Course if you have an incubator, you can always go that route too. One of my friends has Easter Eggers here in Parrish, but I don’t think hers are purebred (not that Easter eggers are) either as I’m not sure what breed of rooster she currently has.
I’ve included pics of 2 of our roosters. Apparently I don’t have a pic of our Australorp on my phone.
Welcome
