Swedish Flower Hen Thread

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I wanted to share today's egg from one of my Swedes. Hers are always a little speckled, and the speckles are usually a pink/purple color, but this one had more than I've ever seen in my SFH eggs!
 
Some updated photos of my SFH Rooster, "Flower". Probably not the most original name, but it always makes me think of Bambi :) One of these days I want to get a few SFH girls, but for now he just hangs out with my layer flock and helps make pretty mix breed babies.





 
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Hey everyone,
just cameback from a trip to Stockholm, Sweden. Went to a zoo there and saw some very beautiful SFH, wasn´t able to get any eggs, though. I´ve got some from a German breeder lined up, though. In the meantime, the eggs of my first two SFH broodies hatched while I was away. I didn´t feel good about leaving at exactly the hatch date, I usually like to check on them and maybe help out any chicks that might need it. This time I just had to rely on my girls to do the job right. The first one, who caused me a lot of worries because she left the nest so often, managed to hatch 5 of her 8 eggs; one chick died. Here are some pics of her babies:


The second one has 3 babies. She had 9 eggs. I found 1 dead chick and 3 unhatched eggs. 2 are missing- I don´t know if they hatched and died outside or what. The 3 she has are very healthy, though:



It´s their first time as mothers, so I´m hoping they´ll do better next time. I do get a lot better rates with my bator.
This girl is driving me crazy. She left her nest about a month ago and left her eggs to die on day 4. She´s decided to go broody again, and has been sitting on her eggs for a week now, so I hope it´s serious this time:


And here are my newest out of the bator, they´re about 2-3 weeks old now:
 
Quote: I have seen some blue eyes out of direct GFF birds as well as the red/orange. These blue eyes were on young birds, under two to 3 mo, so I don't know if they would stay blue but they were definitely blue and the parents were from GFF. The parents to these chicks had reddish orange eyes so I don't know if color would change in time or what. Does anyone know if the Swedish description mentions eye color?
 
Hi everyone,

In one of my coops the chicks have been slowly disappearing. The chicks in the other coop are fine. At first I thought that maybe the mother wasn´t doing a good job; now she´s only got one chick left. Today I went out to the coop and discovered a tunnel dug under the broody box. RATS! My husband had told me a couple weeks ago that he saw one get run over by a car on the street nearby, but I never would have thought that they go after chicks. I usually have the food higher up, but since the chicks hatched I have to have chick feed lower, or they wouldn´t be able to reach. And... I put it by the broody box, which probably led the rats right to the chicks. Well I set up traps all around the coop, but haven´t caught a single rat. Since I have two girls in the same coop due to hatch chicks next week, it was time for desperate measures. I read up on this site all about getting rid of rats, but there are about as many opinions as there are posts. Since the traps weren´t working I now put rat poison in the tunnel and covered the entrance with bricks. I found three more entrances nibbled in the walls of the coop, and put poison in there, too, out of reach of the chickens. It was a hard decision; I´m really afraid the chickens might get hold of a dead/dying rat and nibble on it, but it´s a risk I have to take... Hopefully the one chick now has a chance of surviving, and the other 2 future moms will have a chance of raising some nice new Swedish chicks. If I wrote the words I´d like to describe the buggers, I´d probably be banned from this site forever. This also explains why I suddenly have fleas in the coop. I guess bad experiences are also just a part of raising chickens, and I hope I´ve learned from this so that I will react earlier next time, provided the poison works!
 

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