Thanks Debbi! The 3 chicks I hatched were some of her first eggs and were slightly lighter than these. This is the color she has been giving me for the last 2 weeks...of course 4 had holes in them because she is a scratcher and scratches all of the shavings out of the way and exposes the wood floor of the nest box and poof the egg hits the wood. The dog enjoyed those and didn't care 1 lick what color they were, I was tore up...I wanted to incubate them so bad.
Had a scare with my Bill Sr the other day.......found him around noon covered by snow and frozen with a slightly bloody comb by a hole in the fence into the pasture where obviously something quite large got in.
He had to have been there all night and it was cold 27 degrees overnight and had been snowing off and on. He was just laying there staring and not blinking, not moving. I thought the worst and bent to pick him up and he blinked, that scared the you know what out of me and I jumped, LOL! I picked him up, his feet and legs were white, frozen up to his thighs. As soon as he realized he was almost off the ground he freaked out (which this bird never does..I assume he was still freaked out by whatever had taken place during the night) so I put him down and I could see he was trying to orient himself with where he was and appeared somewhat lost, but was able to move about and was walking fine, I took off walking, he followed and we headed back to the coop about 150' away. Along the back we followed a trail of white feathers from one of my Delaware hens (#36 my favorite) to the coop door which was tore up. Bill freaked out again once we got to the door of the coop.
I put him back in and surveyed the damage and took a head count.......birds missing at this point are 2 Blue Copper hens, 1 Welsummer hen and 1 Delaware. 4 birds in one night...whatever it was hungary and made more than one trip. I found another trail of Blue Copper Marans approx. 30' further away from the first trail, but still headed back to the hole in the fence where I found Bill.
I fixed the door, fixed the fence and made the entire perimeter of the fence hot, nothing has been back and Bill was doing great by that very afternoon.
That's terrible Kim...I'm so sorry that you lost some girls. Sure glad that Bill Sr made it through that. How is he doing now? Still ok? You're gonna have to do some mighty hatching to get yourself a nice pen of Marans going again!
thanks for your help!
