Growing my little flock

[DonyaQuick]

A broody Squishy means time for these...

Two from Dimple, two from Chungus. Squishy has fake eggs while I prep a safe-to-hatch place in my home office once more. Once she's moved in, I will swap.

Fingers crossed on the Chungus eggs...it'll be my third attempt with her eggs. Looks like I have 100% egg fertility this time, which I did not in the previous attempts (in fact now I've seen the obviously fertile ones, I now think it was 0% fertility from her before; hopefully I'm right!).

 

[DonyaQuick]

The Chungus eggs have a dot. YEEEESSSSSS. Still working on getting things cleaned up to bring Squishy in...incubator is doing fine for the moment. Probably not going to be able to tell what's going on with the Dimple eggs for some time; they have a strange texture that makes candling them really hard.

Meanwhile...I go to check for eggs and this is what I find. Not sure which is stranger, this egg pyramid today or the stolen LED bulb they put in a nestbox a while back.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Set up the modular broody cube and had to move broody Squishy inside yesterday evening. It was 20F out of nowhere last night and she was shivering when it dropped below 40F. Being broody, she doesn't sleep in the chicken huddle. She seems much happier in the warm indoors. She is on ceramic eggs right now but I will give her the real ones from the incubator in a day or two once she's been in this space for a bit. With any luck, in about 2 more weeks there will be peep peeps.

 

[DonyaQuick]

When your hens melt into a contiguous feather puddle...

And yeah, there are hen saddles...I'm not proud of that. There are some scruffy feathers. Prior to this year I thought over-breeding was due to the roos being a bit aggressive and just jumping on hens whenever they wanted, so thought it wouldn't be an issue for my flock. My brother roos, Junior and Monster, don't do the deed unless invited- they're really quite good about that. However, I was not expecting three of my 2-year-old hens to suddenly come down with a case of the spring crazies. There were, uh...a lot of invitations. My 1-year-old hens did not this.

Squishy is doing great with her 4 eggs. She comes out for a dust bath daily. A little over a week to chicks hopefully. All 4 eggs candle easily and are lively.

Assuming I get a good hatch, my plan is...

• all pullets --> 2 to the main flock, 2 to join the Beans.
• at least 1 cockerel --> pullets to the main flock, then start a bachelor flock with Vanilla Bean and move Coco Bean to the main flock (more on that in a bit)
• all roos --> big bachelor flock with Vanilla Bean, move Coco, and possibly get some other pullets for the main flock.

Vanilla and Coco Bean were very attached to each other when younger, but they're becoming less so. Coco seems like she wants to run off and join the circus (my main flock lol) and Vanilla Bean is almost exclusively interested in me. Any time they're out together, Mr Vanilla Bean just wants to be carried around by me. It's a pretty sharp contrast to Junior and Monster who very diligently follow their hens around.

The main flock will be moving into a new, bigger setup soon.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Went to do a last candling today to see if all was well and the first egg I picked up peeped rather loudly at me! Was not expecting that...farther along than I thought. Fingers crossed the hatch goes well.

 

[DonyaQuick]

3 hatched so far; 4th is zipping. Two chicks came out to say hi when they heard me and one immediately went in my hand unprompted, so that has to be one of the Chungus chicks lol

 

[fuzzi]

I just found, and read, and thoroughly enjoyed your thread.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Oh this is the tough part now...the wait with egg #4. It's got a hole and is quite vocal, so I'm just going to let it do its thing for now, but its siblings are getting bouncy quickly. That in turn is making mama wiggle around a lot to accommodate them, which I'm pretty sure is what happened in my hatch last year where Scruffy got her beak bonked partway through zipping. As a precaution I've got the incubator warmed up and running in the background.

 

[DonyaQuick]

#4 is out and about! Blurry photo but the only one I have with all four visible.

And I have also been reminded that I need to pause giving any treats to Squishy now that the chicks are all out. We are officially in the phase where she's going to immediately crumble up anything I give to her and try to give it to the chicks, whether they are old enough to actually eat it or not.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Oops, misplaced my old chick feeders so for now I'll just use a bo-....or the floor I guess.