It's really been quite the crazy year this year. Shortly after losing Brianna we lost her best friend Birdie, I really believe she died due to heart break, they were inseparable. Birdie was the only disabled bird I've ever kept and that is because I know she was genuinely happy and didn't require all that much extra care. We successfully hatched out quite a few of her young and none of them showed any issues too.
Summer 2022, we lost all our birds. I don't have an exact count but we had roughly between 100-200 birds at this time. One day every bird seemed fine, the next they were just dropping like flies. I called out a specialist and they determined as a form of bird flu and said the (very high for England) temperature was causing respiratory issues. All of our birds were taken, except for a group of 28, 1 week old chicks and that is because they all tested negatively and were "far enough away" from the rest of the birds.
Never found out more about what type of bird flu it was or where my birds ended up meeting their end, I didn't really want to know at the time. The next day I ordered 70 hatching eggs off
eBay.
66 eggs hatched and I split them 33 into a brooder, we had a very overdue order for 48 chicks so even though we had managed to get some numbers back they were mostly due to leave us. When the original 28 turned 6 weeks, I killed all but 2 males, which left 14 females with 2 males. These are to be our source of fertile eggs for incubating.
So, now we have the 14:2 in one layer cage and in the other is currently an unsexed mix of 9 birds. The eggs I hatched have some really cool colours (I've only had pharaoh, silver, Italian) so for now they're calm and can stay there whilst I don't need the space. I did kill about 9 boys last week from that group.
Collecting some eggs from the larger group, tomorrow night should mean I have enough to fill my favourite incubator up (64 eggs). So, around Monday should be able to see if we have any fertile eggs! Have seen the boys getting busy so I will be hopeful.
The cages we are using now are still modified XL guinea pig cages, I was using a lot of wood chips and constantly just chucking more on top every week but now I am trying to manage it better to stop it smelling so using a layer of sand and then wood chip and seeing how that goes. Main thing is trying to stop them from being messy with our waterers, I am not the biggest fan of the nipple drinkers/cups I like the simple gravity hanging ones, I just put them on bricks.
Yeah... Busy year.. let's see if we get some more chicks soon I guess. Would be amazing to be able to get our numbers back ourselves, I don't like buying hatching eggs when I can try hatch my own.
