Progeny from heroic rooster

[sakerobot]

The egg laying pullet was one with a DE coat.

Also, here's the broody BLRW:

We'll be giving her a custom built brooding enclosure soon, currently she's inside the main coop.

 

[sakerobot]

We found even smaller ones. 5 pullet eggs so far.

 

[sakerobot]

The young 14 have started going outside. The store we were going to get 5 more chicks from didn't get them from the hatchery this week, so we're probably not going to try adding more chicks now due to the age gap. These will go into the small coop soon.

Some bigger chickens:

 

[sakerobot]

With the broody hen, Goldie henceforth: she has four eggs left, we candled them and two are definitely going, the other two we'll check back on. There was a bit of a mess - somehow she ended up with 8 eggs, including a training egg from another nesting box. Yesterday there were two eggs on the coop floor and the wrong chicken was sitting the box. This hen has been causing issues and perhaps pecking on her while she nested. The offensive hen, PC (short for "Princess Chicken", a title she got back when she was picked on to the point of a bleeding comb, since then she's been picking on younger hens) has been moved to the basement hospital because she's been dropping shelless eggs and we've been wanting to give her a week of calcium pills.

Our attempt to move her to an external nesting box failed and resulted in her destroying one of the eggs. We might just let her hatch them in the coop, no one else bothers her and all the roosters are respectful when she puffs up.

 

[sakerobot]

Candled again, 3 eggs are going. One of them is a Spessex egg. The father could be anyone, but Ares and Apollo are probably most likely. This could be a fun guessing game once they hatch.

 

[sakerobot]

Some pictures of Aristophanes and how unique his coat pattern turned out.

 

[sakerobot]

The 14 chicks have been transferred outside into the small coop. They will have their own small yard at first, until everyone is united.

Their ages are about 3w2d and 2w5d. The temperature outside is above 55F at night and between 70 and sometimes the 90s during the day. We gave them a brooder in case they need it.

It will be the first time we'll be adding young pullets to a flock with roosters.

The six roosters to this day are all getting along. They have established an order, with Ares at the top, and they're all apparently really into strong work ethics. The only difficult thing right now is that some hens are being mated too much. Since the roosters don't hate each other they end up "taking turns" instead. For what it's worth, they all seem to be following the Pervert to Gentlemen template, with Ares, and Apollo and Adonis being pretty good gentlemen, especially Ares. We can shower Ares with grapes, and he'll call over the rest of the flock and make them each have some before even considering eating one himself. Even the youngest Aristophanes has started clucking about food for hens, and it has now entered his mind that it might be polite to dance for a lady before mating-though he's still in the "after" phase.

Goldie is still doing great with her 3 eggs. We'll let her hatch them in the main coop. I'm a bit concerned about how to make sure her chicks have access to water and chick starter crumbles without the big dinosaurs eating everything, any suggestions? I could try building something short in theory.

 

[thistlewick]

omg it was *delightful* reading your paragraph about your roosters hahaha the 'pervert to gentleman template' is SO accurate lolol

re; the chicks in the big hen house -- I literally sucked it up and just put down those baby feeders with food in there for the first week.

YES, it sucked.
YES, I lost a lot of food

BUT, the good news is, the 'wasted' food that fell out -- the mama hen just taught them to scratch for it and dig in the bedding for it.

Now they are almost 4 weeks old and can hop onto the feeders themselves (and forage with mama all day long, too)

I put down a baby waterer too, right in front of the nipple waterers - chicks can learn nipple waterers after 1 week so I just was brutal and removed the baby waterer after a week. They learned. I just have all kinds of heights of nipples so they can reach some.

 

[sakerobot]

Spreading extra food for a couple weeks sounds easy enough.

Yesterday the new chicks got their temporary yard:

The big chickens were all very curious:

 

[sakerobot]

The new chicks apparently fancy themselves full fledged adult birds now, roosting with authority above everyone else:

Looks like Goldie might be going into lockdown, she didn't seem to come out much today, if at all. Yesterday she had a nice dust bath though:

Those appear to be Arthur's BR daughters that she was with.