Olandsk Dwarf Chickens

[BerrytangleFarm]

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

[celticgarden]

No idea! I was looking at my chicks last night wondering how many roosters I'll end up with...

 

[celticgarden]

Now that is a sweet image! I'm already getting a wacky reputation (not much agricultural interest here in CT it seems). I think it's a great idea but I would be committed.

Have fun!

 

[mlm Mike]

I had given 6 chicks to a friend a few months ago as a backup if something happened to my flock. I heard from her over the Holidays,
1 cockerel and 5 pullets.

 

[JohnnyHarkerHts]

deleted, posted wrong

 

[JohnnyHarkerHts]

A question. My little flock of chicks are running away from human contact. They crowd together in the corner of their brooder when I go to change the water or feed. Not sure if now is the time to start enticing them with treats or wait a bit. They seem adamant that humans are evil. I kind of think it's the age. My other hens learned eventually as they grew that people=food. While I never convinced them to love being handled I would prefer the Olandsk dwarfs to be OK with it. Advice welcome.

Linda

I've found that it's sort of group mentality.

When my birds are together and "talking amongst themselves" they do exactly what your birds do.


The real test as to whether they are friendly or not is to separately try to hold each one AWAY from the flock out of sight and out of ear shot.

Every time I've done this, my birds turn into rather friendly birds, especially the Rooster who seems to be visibly relieved at not having to perform his duties, which every rooster considers a matter of pride, dignity and life and death LOL.

Once the hens/flock are out of sight and earshot, he immediately starts to "chicken talk directly to me".

I imagine many would agree that when they do this, they sound like they are responding appropriately to whatever you do.

Bring him food, and he clucks approvingly. Bring him something he really loves to eat (his favorite is white bread) and he clucks become excited as he starts to eat in overdrive trying to see how big of a piece of bread he can swallow at once.

He doesn't like to be left in the room alone. So when I walk somewhere he can't see me he starts to cluck in a panicked sort of rapid voice that sounds like he is saying "where r u going? You can't leave me here!" He calms down immediately when he sees me again.

I don't know if this is common, but my rooster when alone will cuddle and enjoys being pet as it puts him in sort of a trance. When I stop it takes him a minute or so to open his eyes up. While I do this he makes those content chicken sounds you often overhear flocks make as they settle down for the night.

The moment he can hear and/or see the flock however it's back to squawking "run the ogre is coming to feed er um kill us all" and struggling to get free to run to defend his flock LOL

 

[naturespace]

johnnyH, this is really interesting. I'm going to have to try this with my chickens. I don't have any ODs yet, but would be interesting to see how my main cock acts without the flock around.

 

[celticgarden]

That is interesting and an entertaining description LOL. I moved the babies to their own section of the coop (with the heat source). I want the transition to be as stress free as possible so no more handling for now. They have to adapt to being within view of the big girls and the surprise buff Orpington rooster who is now crowing every morning! Yes, Cedric the surprise. He's beautiful but destined not to stay.

 

[JohnnyHarkerHts]

johnnyH, this is really interesting. I'm going to have to try this with my chickens. I don't have any ODs yet, but would be interesting to see how my main cock acts without the flock around.

I don't know if it makes a difference, but I do have a Serama rooster which are supposedly easier to handle. I don't know if that's simply due to size or that they are calmer. I know that if he were a larger rooster, it wouldn't be so easy to get him away from his hens LOL

 

[tbird9]

Hello everyone!

I feel a bit late to the party, but I'm happy to be joining now because I have been raising some Olandsk Dwarfs for a year now and they are definitely awesome. I'm quite interested in all of the discussions that have been going on here and love the growing collective knowledge on this breed.

We started out with a pair that we won at auction Chirstmas Day 2011. Later in the spring we got one more pair and one trio. Here's a picture of the trio right after they arrived in early March:


These two girls actually went broody together in August. They sat together in one nest box on 9 eggs. All of them hatched, but they ended up getting only four chicks to maturity, only three are true, the other one is half Silkie. Here is that bird:



and with her sisters:
a close-up of them:
a not great pic of their brother:0

I also have this hen from a round of incubating that I did in August:

She was originally one of about 20, but we had some bad luck with them. Sigh. I also only have one of the original roos left. One I gave away and one died. Double sigh. I will give more details on what happened with those situations later, but I feel like talking about more fun things right now.

Like the "mega-hatch" that I am currently in the middle of, yay! I got a 300 egg incubator at Thanksgiving and spent December filling it up with eggs from my own birds and lots of ebay auctions. I have basically been setting at least a dozen eggs a day since then, and have had birds hatching everyday since December 18th! Yes, I'm crazy.

So, since 11/28 I have set a total of 64 eggs with Olandsk parentage. I have three Silkies that have been running with the Olandskies when they aren't broody. Since I can't tell the difference between the Oly and the Silkie eggs I have been incubating all the eggs I collected from their box. So far 37 chicks have hatched and I've had 5 duds, and 22 still incubating. Of the 37, 20 are pure Oly, 15 are half Silkie, and 2 look to have been fathered by my one of my Maiden Rock bantam roos, he is good at escaping from the pen where we keep the roos we don't need for breeding at the moment.

I'm not sure how many photos to safely put in one post, so I'll make another post with pictures of all the babies.