Morning all!

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Casey76

Casey76

Songster
8 Years
Joined
Jan 27, 2011
Messages
113
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101
Location
Alsace, France
Thought I would need to give myself a new or reintroduction!

I've been out of poultry keeping for 4 years after my flock of mainly home bred fancy birds was wiped out after consecutive marten attacks, and I didn't have the heart to restock.

In fact 2 years ago I got rid of all of my coops, fencing and paraphernalia. However, this year, I'm giving my garden an overhaul, I've had a couple of big trees cut down, and suddenly I seem to have a lot more space!

When I was ill over the weekend, I was browsing on my iPad (dastardly inventions, worst purchase I've ever made! ;) ), and I suddenly found myself having bought an Omlet Eglu cube and a large walk in cage :o

I have a small idea of where I'm going to put it, at least for the time being, and hopefully having a fully enclosed cage will help with biosecurity.

Of course, I could start with getting a couple of layers from my local farmers market... but noooooo... I've already ordered my first set of hatching eggs - non specific breeds, and mainly for their wonderful egg colours (the backyard flock is a mix of araucana and derivatives, plus Marans and others, so the eggs are advertised as being all colours from blue to white, to khaki and olive, to deep red. that should be interesting!)

At the same time I've also sent off some queries about getting some specific breed eggs, and as I'm always a proponent of upholding local and regional rare breeds I'm currently looking at uncommon colour Marans :)

My local agri centre doesn't have it's day olds yet - which is probably a good thing, otherwise I'd end up completely overstocked and I haven't even got my coop yet!

I'm getting rather excited about everything arriving, and looking forward to having chickens in the garden again.
 
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Welcome back to chickens! It sounds like you could end up with a lot of chicks...hope the coop you ordered will hold them all.

Thanks for joining us!
 
Ah well, you see I always base it on this calculation:

Eggs through the post = 50% hatch rate
Any eggs hatched = 50% cockerels

Therefore if I order 20 eggs, I might, *might* get 5 pullets :D

Of course, I may not even get that many! Males are normally culled as soon as they are identifiable, unless bought specifically for meat.

For me a large part of the pleasure is the incubating and hatching... watching the peeps grow, and then of course, waiting for the first egg!
 
You may want to check out the predator threads on BYC, for ways to prevent some attacks. I know martens are quite nasty. Are you allowed to use some electrified fencing to surround your chicken facilities? That may help, also if any wire you use has small openings like 1/2" hardware cloth. They may call it something else in your country. Chicken wire is very flimsy and doesn't hold up to predators. Hardware cloth does, and lasts much longer. There is even a small 1/4" mesh but, the coop and run needs wire protection underneath to prevent diggers, and a solid top to keep climbers out.

I hope the martens have moved on to some other area by now. Are you allowed to trap them?


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