Hillside Birds

[chicken dinner]

 

[chicken dinner]

Genius!

Thanks!
I am having lots of fun!

 

[Bigdumogre]

Give you a lot of credit for making that area work for you. And looks easy to expand

 

[chicken dinner]

Give you a lot of credit for making that area work for you. And looks easy to expand

It took a bit of head scratching to build this coop, hillside and lots of rocks. The last coop I built was on level ground, and I could dig post holes!

 

[chicken dinner]

I am hoping one of my two layers starts to set, all my chicken have been incubated thus far.

Rowdy the rooster, I watch old Rawhide shows on youtube, hence his name.

 

[chicken dinner]

An outdoor brooding pen was today's project:

 

[chicken dinner]

This flock began with a gifted 12 egg carousel type amazon incubator. We hatched 5 batches of eggs, then discarded it, due to mold developing in the heater and controls area.

Got a different incubator, this holds 16 eggs in trays, that tilt. Well yesterday lockdown started. This morning there were zero hatched. Got coffee sat down to the PC and heard a racket, #1 was out and about. Woot!

A couple of hours later, and I have 4 chicks running around!

Great fun!

On a side note, my black Austrolorp birds are throwing out a lot of yellow tan birds. Talked to the person we got eggs from, it seems a traveling free-range rooster visited their free-ranger flock at some point.

Never had an incubator before, both times we raised chickens before, we had broody hens. Broody hens are great, but incubating is so much more fun!

 

[chicken dinner]

11 hatched, 3 more are piped,
and two that have not piped, yet.

 

[chicken dinner]

We hatched 14 out of 16 eggs, the last two, the non-hatched eggs showed no signs of growth when we candled them.

14 out of 16, that seems like a pretty fair hatch rate.

With 2 hens laying, it took 8 days to get the 16, then they went into the incubator.

 

[chicken dinner]

The chicks are in our brooder, a folding kennel.