Rusty Bucket Farm

[CoopBoots]

7/23 Updates:

Hatch is complete!

Here's Sorsha, who got excited after her third hatched and did not wait for #4. Daisy took that one in (after all, they were ALL hers originally! Sorsha got half-done eggs!) She ended up with a yellow, a strawberry-blonde, and a brown with white headspots??

Is brown going to be barred?! How?!?!! Maybe egg-mama is the daughter of the barred rocks in the bonus flock. Can a barred grandmother pass on barring to grandchildren???

Of note: One of Sorsha's has an ear injury or irregularity; Daisy ALSO had one with a strange ear. Sorsha's is the most obvious. See here:

This baby gets confused about where mom is more often, and for a moment I thought it might be hearing and vision impaired. However, after watching more closely I've seen it call for mama and be answered, so Sorsha has things in hand. No I haven't seen any pecking but of course, I did have two mamas hatching next door to one another. It's more than possible there was drama that I missed which is responsible.

Daisy is slower to leave the coop than Sorsha, so I have not got good pictures yet. She ended up with a black, a black with chocolate tones in the face, a brownish-blueish-yellow on bottom, and another two yellow. While one of her yellows also had a darker "hole" area it did not really look bloody like the one above. I'm already having trouble telling it from its sibling.

We had some drama breaking over the course of the brooding period, because Sorsha and Daisy both insist on brooding in the main nestboxes. So we lost 3 eggs or so to nest drama; one too early to tell, and two that were definitely viable. With 9 remaining until hatch time, we got 8 babies. Noodle's egg predictably did not hatch.

I'm not certain what I would do differently next time. It is hard with broodies that brood based on location rather than eggs when they are feeling competitive. Daisy raised Sorsha; who would have thought she would aggressively supplant her own mother?? Her different genetics must certainly have added aggression to her personality. I will say she has gone from running and screaming when I approached her as a pullet to allowing me full handling rights of her new babies. I've become a big proponent of "breakfast in bed" for my broodies as it seems to both prepare them to allow handling and lets me check on their health. It isn't a lot of food really (don't want to make it difficult for them to not poop in thr nest!), but the water has been the big thing. I was truly afraid of this heat-wave killing off a broody or otherwise impacting the hatch but everything overall went quite well.

I have so much respect for the dedication of a good broody. Hands down the most treasured birds in flock, except perhaps for Noodle

 

[CoopBoots]

Daisy's 5:

A reddish-yellow!

Same headspots as Sorsha's brown, I think! I just adore those color. Hoping they end up a partridge or a brown-leghorn type coloring.

Blurry but note the lack of a white throat and the chocolate tones around the beak compared to the black below...

Here is the usual penguin-black with white throat. Also much smaller/thinner body.

Last pictured is Daisy's baby with the ear irregularity:

He was extra squirmy so excuse him looking squished--he's not being held as tightly as it looks! I do think his little eye is also a bit irregular, too. I'm going to keep observing both this one and Sorsha's. I just doubt two cases of accidental ear trauma to yellow babies... some kind of genetic situation perhaps that I should be paying attention to. No idea who laid the eggs in question outside of probably one of my buffs. But this baby is lemon yellow while the other ear case is a strawberry yellow. Hmmm.