The Old Folks Home

[ronott1]

I just moved my little miracle chick into it's brooder and she has had her first taste of wet starter mash and water. Loved the wet mash, hated the water.

I just candled the two remaining eggs in the bator. I'm still seeing some veining in one but the second chick has broken through through the air cell. I can see some part of its body poking through that doesn't have a beak attached to it so I'm looking for a pip any time now. I had dropped the humidity in the incubator last night as baby was having such a hard time breathing an drying out. Seemed to help her a lot. Now to get the last two chicks coaxed out of their shells and I have a breather for 25 days when the latest broody's eggs hatch.

How are y'all doing as far as flies are concerned? Our flies were absent until last week when after the last rain, every fly in the county seemed to descend upon us. I've been hanging flie strips and bait bottles right and left and have finally resorted to going out at sunset and staging full scale massacres with my hand held electric bug zapper.

Flies are not too bad here yet. In a couple of weeks tomatoes will be harvested and then processed a couple of miles from be to the north west. The waste, also called silage from processing will be dumped onto a field about 3 miles to the north east of me. The fields, processing and silage will produce lots of flies and a very bad smell...both of which will be blamed on my chickens.... bad neighbors!

 

[microchick]

Looks like I have an internal pip on egg #2 and not a moment too soon.

Burd, as she has been christened, has found her voice and in spite of her furry cuddle monkey friend along with a mirror, she wants to sit under my hand.

C'mon egg #2, momma needs another chick.

Ronott1, I can just imagine how bad that must smell. There is a feed lot for dairy calf steers not too far from us. You never know they are there....unless the wind blows from the north west that is.

 

[ronott1]

Looks like I have an internal pip on egg #2 and not a moment too soon.

Burd, as she has been christened, has found her voice and in spite of her furry cuddle monkey friend along with a mirror, she wants to sit under my hand.

C'mon egg #2, momma needs another chick.

Ronott1, I can just imagine how bad that must smell. There is a feed lot for dairy calf steers not too far from us. You never know they are there....unless the wind blows from the north west that is.

The smell goes through cycles--Monday is has a "sanitized" smell because it is treated. The smell gets worse--It will smell like the feed lot because decomposing organic matter smells the same regardless of the source--going into the week. It smells really bad by Sunday.

Oddly, the neighbors do not seem to realize that my "chickens" only smell bad when the wind is from the north.

 

[microchick]

I keep telling myself it could always be worse....like hog confinement worse.

 

[chickadoodles]

Ron you could always put up a sign that say's it's the silage down the road to protest there!
Good luck on the other eggs hatching.
Micro I love the hog confinement!

 

[microchick]

So here is my little miracle chick officially christened Burd with her snuggle monkey.

Egg #2 now has officially pipped internally. I can see a little beak clearly in the air cell so hopefully she (think pullet, will pullet) will have a little friend tomorrow sometime.

 

[Wickedchicken6]

I just moved my little miracle chick into it's brooder and she has had her first taste of wet starter mash and water. Loved the wet mash, hated the water.

I just candled the two remaining eggs in the bator. I'm still seeing some veining in one but the second chick has broken through through the air cell. I can see some part of its body poking through that doesn't have a beak attached to it so I'm looking for a pip any time now. I had dropped the humidity in the incubator last night as baby was having such a hard time breathing an drying out. Seemed to help her a lot. Now to get the last two chicks coaxed out of their shells and I have a breather for 25 days when the latest broody's eggs hatch.

How are y'all doing as far as flies are concerned? Our flies were absent until last week when after the last rain, every fly in the county seemed to descend upon us. I've been hanging flie strips and bait bottles right and left and have finally resorted to going out at sunset and staging full scale massacres with my hand held electric bug zapper.

Flies have been out here for a while...but I beat them with my bug bags which appear to be looking rather full. I do notice huge flies out in the past few days.

The worst is mosquitoes. The coop doesn't have any in the evening but they swarm in there as soon as it's dark. The poor chickens! I can hear them stomping on the roosts. I got a roll of screen. I'm going to put it up over the hardware cloth to keep them out. Wow, vinyl screen's expensive!

A few have gotten inside. When getting water for the chickens I see where they're coming from. They've made a home in two holes in the old boards on the eves on this house. We will have to fix that. They're about 1.75-2 inches long.

 

[chickadoodles]

Micro, Burd is so adorable!

We don't have so many flies right now I guess from all the rain.
But we are over run with skitters!

 

[ronott1]

Ron you could always put up a sign that say's it's the silage down the road to protest there!
Good luck on the other eggs hatching.
Micro I love the hog confinement!

this is the neighbor that thought my thornless black berries were poison oak. I have other examples but she is dumb as a stump!

 

[Wickedchicken6]

Honestly Wicked I'm not sure what went wrong. I'm using a touch screen tablet DH got for me last month and still getting used to it. When I touch the image I want to copy, I get a tool bar that comes up and usually I press the copy image or copy image location. This time it gave me the whole package of gibberish. I was finally able to get it to do what I wanted and edit it out but it wasn't without a struggle.

I'm more inclined to think the problem was user error over site although I gotta admit I liked the old site's way of copying images a lot better.

I used a permalink and I was writing text and I wonder if I didn't click twice to free my cursor from the quote...but it copied a bunch of URLs and number codes for 3-4 pages and my message was buried within this. I posted the issue and went about cutting and pasting my message to a word document and thankfully everything I had written was there. I had been working most of the day on it (I kept having to leave to help DH) and I thought I lost everything. I would have been totally defeated had that happened.

When I posted a small section to show what happened to Nifty it multiplied it into about 5 pages...lol. It's happened to me once since but not as bad. That why I mentioned it this morning...lol. I hope to figure out what I did so I can explain what I did so they can see if it's an issue...or if it's just me. (Prob just me)