INDIANA BYC'ers HERE!

[Mother2Hens]

her are my chicks they are ees and two silkies what color you think the grey/blue chicks will be as adults

nathanaf ~ My Blue Silkies from bradselig have turned more of a rich, dark gray as they've grown. My husband and son kept referring to them as "the black ones" and the Blue Splash as "the white one,"

which caused me to finally give them names.

Busy weekend as usual! I had to wrangle and box two unhappy roosters on Sunday to get them off to their new home. Chewie was, of course, a great boy and I was able to get him boxed with minimal fuss. Ozzie, the Marans cockerel was not having anything to do with the box of doom. I barely got him in there and he erupted out a tiny hole in the top. I had to tackle him mid air. After getting him boxed and carried to the car I went back for Chewie and discovered that my old skinny horse had decided to play with the box!!! Poor Chewie!! The horse was nowhere to be seen when I walked away, not sure where he came from and what got into his old butt! The box was on its side, no real damage done but he was NOT HAPPY about being shaken around!!! It was great meeting amwchickin, I hope the boys do well at her place. I was really sad to see them go but my four barebacked hens were sooooooo much happier already this morning. Still, it was a bit strange not to hear them this morning

.

I'm gearing up to start run construction in the next couple of weeks. I need to get my Bielies and Isbars separated soon before the ginormous Bielies start trying to mount the tiny Isbars!!! That would be bad!!!

My newish babies from Brad are doing well! I took his crooked beak Silkie and she (hopeful!) seems to be settling in well. I also took one of his non-bearded silkies and she (again, hopeful) is a sassy little thing! I decided they need Ditzy names so they are Fanta and Moxie (after a couple of brands of soda). Here's hoping I get a broody!

ChickCrazed~ Haha I named my Splash Silkie "Ditzy" (pic/post on pg. 2716).

That's a funny story about your horse playing with a rooster in a box! I've read that horses in general have the intelligence of a 5 year old human. So your old horse is still curious and learning!

Btw, Thanks for the compliment, but I can't give up Bonbon. lol She's a family favorite.


Bonbon is teaching them to drink dirty water out of the handle of an upside-down lawn cart (even though a bowl of fresh water was a few feet away).

Raising Chicks Outside
Today Bonbon had the chicks out all day. Bonbon is very self-assured, and the other chickens in the yard are all very respectful. It all seems crazy since those bantam chicks are so tiny. In our fenced-in part of the back yard, Bonbon had them running around up and down hills and over rocks with no problems. I even saw one eat a regular sized worm. They are really interesting to watch, but I am terrified that I will step on one. After today, I decided to just let them out of their coop every morning like we do the other chickens. Bonbon brought them back to their coop this evening and taught them to go up the steps where they're now sleeping on the second floor.

There's a terrible new chicken disease that's running rampant all over the midwest. They're calling it Chicken Brain Cloud.
It causes large areas of the chicken's brain to stop functioning.
The up side is, in most chickens you can't tell the difference.
:-D

hoosierchicken ~ Haha I know you're joking, but I thought you might be interested to know that chickens in general (Silkies not included! lol) are smarter than people have been led to believe (so we don't feel so bad about eating chicken).

 

[Chaneys Ranch]

I woke up this morning and have been frazzled ever since. One of the first things i do in the morning is check on my incubator. I have no idea what happened but my incubator spent 5 hours at 75F early this morning. I know because my DBF said he checked on it last night before he went to bed and then again this morning at 5:30 when he left to go do a walk marathon thing with his parents. My eggs that i got from ellymayrans are due to hatch this coming wednesday, and now i'm devastated because i might not have a good hatch now. I have no idea what happened to the heating element, and it was a brand new-never before used Little Giant. The fan that i hooked up to it was even still running. I moved the eggs to my spare back-up incubator,but now i have two diffferent hatches in one incubator with one due to go into lockdown tomorrow. It never ends......

Warning: this will be a little pic heavy!

I wanted to give a few updates:

Thursday I received my BLRW hatching eggs that i won off and Ebay auction on mother's day. The listing said 8+ BLRW eggs and when i was taking the eggs out of bubble wrapping, my one extra egg was cracked

The bright side is that all 8 seem to be okay. Hoping i can get these to hatch because my sister and i both want a breeding pair.
this is how my shipped eggs came in the box

this egg is cracked

And i wanted to give an update on my older girls.......

These turned into...
this little one into this...
and this little one into....(ps, ignore the background)
3 out of 4 of my girls are extremely friendly!!! When i was taking their most recent pictures, i decided to sit down on the ground. My BLRWs and my BR then came over and flew up onto to my shoulders and climbed onto my legs. Then they started talking my ear off and fighting over who had the best spot on my legs and shoulders. My EE was stand-offish but i know thats just her. Funny girls, they bring me some much joy with their personalities!!!

shipped eggs I have had yolk soaked boxes and rude sellers...anyways your babies are awesome. Hope alls well for ya and good luck on the BLRWs they are a challenge to find a nice color!

 

[hoosiercheetah]

Sorry about your hen! That's too bad, if she is healthy other wise, she will never know the diff and probably be a happy little hen for a long time to come!!

That's what I'm thinking. I had them all out in the yard yesterday, and she was running around picking grass with the others. She seems to be adapting to one-eyed life pretty well. She's a little jumpy if one of the other comes around from her blind side, especially Penny, the one I suspect of being the eye-pecker. She's also a lot less willing to let me pick her up than she was. She was the friendliest of my flock, so I hope she comes back around.

 

[hoosiercheetah]

Brief(ish) update from newbieland.

I'm temporarily throwing in the towel on fermented feed. The chickens won't eat it if there's a lot of extra water in the feed dishes, so I have to strain it out, and straining water out of feed the consistency of peanut butter takes forever. I just don't have time to strain it twice a day, especially in the morning. The other thing I noticed is a lot of minerals were settling out to the bottom of the fermenting bucket. If anyone has a method for this that doesn't take a lot of extra time, I'd love to hear it. I went back through the FF threads and didn't see anything really helpful, but I was skimming so I might have missed something. Anyway, until I work out a better way, it's back to crumbles so I can scoop and go.

The big down side to that is now they're scattering food all over the place again. Time to build a no-spill bucket feeder or two.

My three new RIR pullets are patiently waiting in quarantine in the garage. I put two cages together to give them a little more room; If I think of it later I'll get a pic of the setup. It makes a nice little cave for them to hide from garage noises. I'm having a really hard time keeping them in such a small space - I can't wait for the time to pass so I can get them out with the rest of the group.

The coop is still evolving. I got rid of pdz and everyone is happier to not have the dust. The side effect is there's now no point in having a poop board, so I'm going to re-build the whole roost. Which is fine with me; I have a really great pine branch that's ready to use, and I can set it a little lower. My big fat orps sound like they're going to break something jumping down from four feet up..

I was in the coop yesterday and Elsa flew down from her custom perch, which is about 9 feet up. She miscalculated her approach path and overshot a little. By the time she had made her descent, she had crossed the coop, so she hit the opposite wall a foot off the ground. No injury, just a lot of flapping and honking. Elsa sounds like a cross between a goose and a dove. the whole spectacle was hilarious, and I swear the GCs were laughing at her. ;-)

Time to make the donuts! Ciao!

 

[gunchief25]

Morning all Cockadoodledoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

 

[hoosiercheetah]

Morning all Cockadoodledoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO what-a-beautiful MMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRning!

You just reminded me of a Scoutmaster who used to wake us up at 6am with that song when we camped out.

 

[CRSelvey]

This is a bad pic, sorry, my ducklings in the foreground (Waddles, Blinky, Darcy and Ditto)
And Diamond and Earl in the background. You may be able t see a few others (possibly) if you are seeing this on your computer. The pics so small on my IPhone I couldn't tell. I've added some Spring flowers around the coop and some wetland grasses around the make shift duck pond, painted some things and spruced things up a bit. Hoping we have a few days to dry out a bit so I can get more done. I'm not so steady on my feet right now and my balance is bad enough without adding mud to the mix!
Brad, this is Diamonds fourth egg! She hadn't missed a day since her first one came and Earl is being sure to show Rudy who she belongs to!!!

I think it looks great and its so nice to see the little guys running around the yard!

This is not very time efficient! But I bet it will taste great! Homemade Goat milk ice cream!!! 6-1/2qts of it.... :0

MMMM, I want some too!

Evansville here....kinda new to "backyard chickens" we have 33 in our coop!

Welcome to the thread.

nathanaf ~ My Blue Silkies from bradselig have turned more of a rich, dark gray as they've grown. My husband and son kept referring to them as "the black ones" and the Blue Splash as "the white one,"

which caused me to finally give them names.
ChickCrazed~ Haha I named my Splash Silkie "Ditzy" (pic/post on pg. 2716).

That's a funny story about your horse playing with a rooster in a box! I've read that horses in general have the intelligence of a 5 year old human. So your old horse is still curious and learning!

Btw, Thanks for the compliment, but I can't give up Bonbon. lol She's a family favorite.


Bonbon is teaching them to drink dirty water out of the handle of an upside-down lawn cart (even though a bowl of fresh water was a few feet away).

Raising Chicks Outside
Today Bonbon had the chicks out all day. Bonbon is very self-assured, and the other chickens in the yard are all very respectful. It all seems crazy since those bantam chicks are so tiny. In our fenced-in part of the back yard, Bonbon had them running around up and down hills and over rocks with no problems. I even saw one eat a regular sized worm. They are really interesting to watch, but I am terrified that I will step on one. After today, I decided to just let them out of their coop every morning like we do the other chickens. Bonbon brought them back to their coop this evening and taught them to go up the steps where they're now sleeping on the second floor.

Oh I love the stories about the babies Julie. They are adorable and it makes me excited for Bella's to hatch. I went downstairs to check on her this morning and I'm pretty sure that I heard a tiny chirp from one of her eggs. It could be my wishful thinking but I think we will have little chicks soon. She only has the three eggs and they are all a cross of a bantam roo and LF hens. It should be interesting.

 

[Leahs Mom]

Brief(ish) update from newbieland.

I'm temporarily throwing in the towel on fermented feed. The chickens won't eat it if there's a lot of extra water in the feed dishes, so I have to strain it out, and straining water out of feed the consistency of peanut butter takes forever. I just don't have time to strain it twice a day, especially in the morning. The other thing I noticed is a lot of minerals were settling out to the bottom of the fermenting bucket. If anyone has a method for this that doesn't take a lot of extra time, I'd love to hear it. I went back through the FF threads and didn't see anything really helpful, but I was skimming so I might have missed something. Anyway, until I work out a better way, it's back to crumbles so I can scoop and go.

The big down side to that is now they're scattering food all over the place again. Time to build a no-spill bucket feeder or two.

I have some ideas that could help... Maybe a "new" pm? Drop me a line to remind me...I'm at work right now and won't be back to computer until later this evening likely but I do have some thoughts that may make life easier.

 

[racinchickins]

I saw a baby turkey this morning peeking out from under one of my broody turkey hens! Wonder how many more are under there? I have three hens that have been brooding I don't know how many eggs.....

 

[racinchickins]

Well I finally got some pictures. I have to apologize ahead of time because my chicks did not get the memo from Kab's or any body else's chicks who cooperate for pictures. Mine did not for even a minute.

These chicks came from Brad.

Russian Orloff (I think)


Pretty sure Orloffs are bearded. This looks exactly like one of my Cream Legbar boys.


These are the chicks I just got this morning. I have no idea which ones are what because none of them are marked. But they are supposed to be Red & Silver Gray Dorking, Blue Orpington, Silver Penciled & Partridge Rocks, SC & RC RIR.




At least the Dorkings should be easy enough. Look for the extra toes. Dorkings should have 5 (like silkies)