Hi everyone! Teresa from Michigan here.
Let me introduce myself as a newbie to the world of chickens. My hubby brought home 6 chicks in April from the local feed store as we agreed it would be a good 'project' for our children to experience. My daughter is 6 and son 3. My daughter named them all within the first couple of days and held them quite a bit while they were in a box in the kitchen for the first week or so. We were all pretty amazed at how quickly they grew and by the middle of May we had a chicken coop/run area built and heat lamp in place and chickens moved out from a much bigger crate that was in the garage. We bought 6 light brahmas that were supposed to be hens (95% probability)... well, at around 14 weeks "Chicken Nugget" began to crow and we realized we had a rooster on our hands. I did more research on the breed and thought oh no, we may have another rooster based on the wattles and comb but a month later no other crowing was coming from the coop so we thought we were safe. I gave the one rooster to a friend because I really don't need a rooster. Our plan was to have just some happy little laying hens. The day after we gave away Chicken Nugget, Missy started crowing! Now they are about 20 weeks old, I'm thinking we have 3 or 4 more roosters and only 1 or 2 hens. Pretty poor odds considering they were supposed to all be hens. Ugh!
The good news is... we definitely have at least 1 hen since my daughter came in yesterday afternoon all excited about finding our 'first' egg! Yay! It was kind of small and I'm hoping they get bigger. She did another one today which as the same size.
Well, now that I'm officially on the board, I'm going to look around and see if I can get some more answers before I ask a bunch of stuff that has already been answered.
Teresa
Let me introduce myself as a newbie to the world of chickens. My hubby brought home 6 chicks in April from the local feed store as we agreed it would be a good 'project' for our children to experience. My daughter is 6 and son 3. My daughter named them all within the first couple of days and held them quite a bit while they were in a box in the kitchen for the first week or so. We were all pretty amazed at how quickly they grew and by the middle of May we had a chicken coop/run area built and heat lamp in place and chickens moved out from a much bigger crate that was in the garage. We bought 6 light brahmas that were supposed to be hens (95% probability)... well, at around 14 weeks "Chicken Nugget" began to crow and we realized we had a rooster on our hands. I did more research on the breed and thought oh no, we may have another rooster based on the wattles and comb but a month later no other crowing was coming from the coop so we thought we were safe. I gave the one rooster to a friend because I really don't need a rooster. Our plan was to have just some happy little laying hens. The day after we gave away Chicken Nugget, Missy started crowing! Now they are about 20 weeks old, I'm thinking we have 3 or 4 more roosters and only 1 or 2 hens. Pretty poor odds considering they were supposed to all be hens. Ugh!
The good news is... we definitely have at least 1 hen since my daughter came in yesterday afternoon all excited about finding our 'first' egg! Yay! It was kind of small and I'm hoping they get bigger. She did another one today which as the same size.
Well, now that I'm officially on the board, I'm going to look around and see if I can get some more answers before I ask a bunch of stuff that has already been answered.
Teresa
