Pipd's Peeps!

[ronott1]

Elly's crop was empty first thing this morning! She's on a strict hand feeding formula diet for now to make sure things are really, actually, truly moving, and then I'll get her back on pellets again before moving her out. No free-ranging for a while after that, either, because I think that's how she clogged up again, gorging on grass when I started taking her outside. Naughty girl scaring me to death! Anyway, on the plus side, I've discovered that if I add just a little less water than I had been, Elly eats her formula out of a dish. No more fighting to syringe it into her!

That is good news!

 

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Good news on that front, yes. Elly continues to improve and is regaining weight now. I'm going to start her on just a little bit of pelleted food today to see if that passes through her system unhindered now.

Unfortunately, I now have yet another bird in a hospital pen. My mom noticed yesterday that one of the Partridge Plymouth Rocks was particularly grouchy with the other birds. I figured it was She Who, who is always pretty severe, but this morning I witnessed Fancy being absolutely brutal toward the other birds at the food dish. After some observation, I also noticed that she has some balance issues going on, almost like she's dizzy. I suspect she's extra grouchy to prevent the other birds from taking advantage of her weakness. So, since the most likely cause that I can find for this 'dizziness' is ingestion of some sort of toxin, now she's on Epsom salt to flush her system. Elly is not pleased to have company again, apparently, because she's been yelling and cackling and carrying on all morning. Silly girl!

But, on the plus side, Reinette is fully integrated back into the flock now. Callette is still angry with her for attempting to fight her the first day I brought her out, but so far she's not being as persistent as she had been at first, so Reinette is getting along fine.



In other news, yesterday was picture day for the kids! The Easter-egger crew is now about 5 months old, and the OEGBs are about 6 months old! So, without any further ado, here are the OEGBs!

I'm stunned at how handsome these boys have gotten, and the girls are becoming so, so sweet! Rigel has surprised me the most with his looks. I was figuring on him just being a mostly white bird, and the picture seems to show that, but in person he's actually only white in his hackles and saddle feathers, while the rest of him is more of a creamy-beige color, darker than the picture shows. Of course, he ran his tail feathers under something while free-ranging, so they're stained across the top like the rest of the free-range boys. Oh, well.

Anyway, now the Easter-egger babies!

(Fifi's not panting here; she was talking to me the whole time I was taking her pictures. )


Of course, the boys were difficult. Titan only posed under his perch, where all the poop is in his pen.

(Recall that he's separated from the rest of the boys because he has it out for the smaller cockerels.)

And the rest of the boys wouldn't come near enough for more than just a single shot of them. I don't know what changed abruptly in Oberon, but he's suddenly quite afraid of me. Only thing I've done since my last post was catch him and move him back to the cockerel pen, so I guess that was traumatic for him. I guess it's better than the aggression he was starting to show toward me, though...

Of course, the EE bantam boys won't let me get anywhere near them on a normal day, so...

Just as a small note, here, Puck's comb is more of a single comb than a pea comb. It's a little fatter than a single comb like it should be a pea comb, but has no 'peas' on the sides like Charon's or Titan's combs do. I thought that was kind of interesting.


Anyway, I think that's all for now, so... Enjoy!

 

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We have ourselves a mystery tonight... This teeny-tiny gray-green egg was on the floor in the corner (with two eggs from the adults, so... )... and I have no clue whose it is!

This picture makes it look a lot bigger than it is, but that's a bantam Cochin egg (brown) and a large fowl Dorking egg (white) next to it in my hand. It's seriously tiny. Like, smaller than my OEGB hen Sybil's eggs, and she lays the smallest eggs out of any of my birds so far! But, it's the wrong color for it to be Vega or Altair's...

At first, I thought it was Fifi's. She's been acting like she could lay any day now. But I performed the good ol' fashioned butt check on her and... Well, she doesn't seem to have the right proportions for a laying pullet. And the plot thickens... Both Mona and Ganymede seem to have the correct spacing.

Right now, based on the size of the egg, I'm leaning toward Ganymede being the new layer, which is totally odd since she's a Silkie mix and I was really expecting her to be a later layer as a result of that... It could be Mona's, but it seems super, SUPER tiny for a bird her size! Even for a pullet egg! It would be the smallest pullet egg I've ever gotten relative to bird size if it was hers! I guess I'll have to keep an eye on that nest spot and see if I can catch one of them in the act in the coming days. I'll update as soon as I know!

 

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A short update from the flock:

A couple days with an Epsom salt flush and Fancy seems back to herself. Knock on wood! I'm going to keep an eye on her for just another day or two to be safe, but she should be heading back out to the flock soon!

Elly is also doing great! No crop slowing now that her meals have returned to being fully pellets. Hopefully soon she can go outside, too, without clogging herself up again!

And no update on the mystery mini-egg. There wasn't one yesterday, so whoever laid it skipped a day. I'll be keeping an eye out again today, so hopefully the mystery will be solved soon!

 

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...Okay, not today. The mystery of the mini-egg continues.

Fifi still seems like her bone structure is too close together for laying. She was in the coop checking out nesting places that were not in the nest boxes ( ), but not down where the mini-egg is being found. She also was still trying to nest, so I still don't think it was her...

Vega was eyeballing the nests as well, but again, wrong egg color for her.

Ganymede and Mona were out in the yard as usual.

It could have happened any time over the past hour or two, as the egg was not warm anymore, but I don't know when, and I still don't know who. Will you girls just spill it already?!

 

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Oh, yes, some Fifi antics, too. She was standing in the lower dropping tray when I got out there, peeking around the door and talking away, as usual. Goofy girl!

"What's the password?"

 

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Okay, mystery solved, I think. Fifi just laid an egg, too, and it's BLUE! But it's also quite small, about the same size as the mystery egg. - EDIT So, I believe Mona is our other layer, and she beat out her sister by just a couple days. Nope, it was Ganymede after all! - These eggs are the smallest pullet eggs I have ever gotten from large fowl pullets (Ganymede is bantam sized--it's just Fifi's egg that's oddly small ). They're even smaller than my bantam hens' eggs!

Here are today's teeny-tiny EE eggs side by side. On my computer screen, they're fairly color accurate to how they look in person--the one is kind of a gray / olive drab and more matte, and the other is a really lovely, shiny blue! Fifi's first egg is on the right, and - EDIT the one that is likely Mona's second egg the one that's actually Ganymede's second egg - is on the left:

 

[drumstick diva]

love the blue egg

 

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I know, isn't it gorgeous? Fifi's been a fun bird to have around, so it wouldn't have mattered to me what color she laid, but I'm really happy with her color. And I'm really happy knowing I've gotten another couple EE hens that both have the blue-egg gene! I read about so many people getting brown-egg-laying EEs and I'm always braced for that to happen here, but it hasn't yet! Watch Ganymede be the one now that I've said that.

 

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IT WAS GANYMEDE!!


I noticed her nesting about an hour ago. Went out to check because she was cackling up a storm, and there, where she'd been nesting, was a teeny-tiny grayish-green egg! So the above picture is Ganymede's second egg on the left, not Mona's! Ganymede, whose EE mother didn't come into lay until 8+ months old, and Silkie grandmother not until 7-and-a-half months old, has came into lay even before her hatchery EE broodmates at just over 5 months old! But, to be fair, now that I've looked it up, her Silkie aunts both started laying at about this age, so I guess I shouldn't be so surprised.