Uh oh... found an egg today! ... - A journal of sorts, from finding eggs to hatching them... Update

[daylily]

Oh my goodness they are soooooooo cute! show us more when the others hatch!

Nope.....expected you to get a start on it. I have some Guinea eggs in the bator to start hatching in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, look at these sweetie pies:

 

[PeepsCA]

Nope.....expected you to get a start on it. I have some Guinea eggs in the bator to start hatching in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, look at these sweetie pies:

Way too cute!

I like the 2 tone one lol.

 

[daylily]

Today the birds were especially funny, they ran from wood nest to coop for over half the day!

Sal was beside himself, one would go in the coop while the other ran for the woods! Then vice versa! It looked like they had a case of diarrhea!

We stood at the window to watch , finally they settled down about 2:30 but it was great intertwinement while it lasted.
Oh the tally: wood's nest - Zero Coop nest - 2 , Mary - 1. She doesn't have a choice since she's cooped up in new "Old Coop" for a few weeks more.

Do any of you have hens that lay more than once a day? Some days I find 3 - 4 in the coop and Mary 2. I collect once a day so this seems that they are laying twice some days. Are they? Has to be!

 

[Country Chickens]

Daylily I have wondered if our pied hen was sometimes catching a very early egg and then laying a second later in the day--but thought I must be wrong. Now I'm wondering. Peeps?

And the chicks are fantastic! I know I personally never get enough. Plus, it just takes soo looong for keets to hatch! So your pics keep me going between times. I did, however, get a few of my own to hatch! Yipee! Five keets popped out right on top of each other yesterday. Four additional eggs have done nothin' and may be duds, but I'll know better when I candle in the morning.

I love how easily they've mixed in with my itty bitty silkie chicks--once they finished pecking each others' weird colored feet! lol

 

[PeepsCA]

Oooh more keetsies! Congrats! LOL they look so tiny next to those fluffy Silkie beasts! Your Silkie babies are adorable, they remind me of little Yettis, lol.

I always hear lots of screamin' in the hatcher towards the end of the hatch if there's fluffed and dried keets runnin' around in there bored, they start eatin toes, or try to, lol. Some of them make a bad habit of it and I hear more screamin' in the brooder for 2-3 days and sometimes I even have to reach in and make the stubborn one let go, it's almost like a pittbull with a locked jaw, lol. I try to keep feed scattered on the floor so they peck at that instead of the tempting toes. I can't imagine what the keets think when they see all the toes to peck at on the Silkies, lol.

As far as I know a Guinea Hen's body is only able to produce one egg a day (and move it on down thru the plumbing), but I've never read anything that specified whether a day was counted as a full 24 hours, or if they can lay one in the early AM then lay another one in the late PM. I've never had more eggs per day than I have Hens, so it's not common in my flocks at least. But who knows. Sometimes when I think a Hen or 2 has skipped a day I'll find an extra egg or 2 a day or so later, buried in the bedding... so maybe the Hens just unburied covered eggs

 

[Country Chickens]

Funny, their dad's name is Yeti. The keets are super small compared to the silkies and also two or three days younger, so at first I worried about them together. I needn't have. The guineas energy and spunk makes them more than a match for the bigger silkies, and pretty soon they were all bedded down together. Course, I do hear the occassional squeal over the toes, though.

Today was our first day that every hen layed, even poor little Ophelia that hops around on one foot and is half the size of the other hens. Course, I'm not sure her egg was the last to by layed, but anyway I guess I'll know soon if they hens are laying double as we now keep them shut up til about 2:00 when they're mostly done laying. And so far they haven't really hid their eggs, or even cared if they saw us stealing. Even when they were using the nest in the woods they didn't care if we came and checked it out so long as their were still 'eggs' in their when they checked on it. Weird. But, the only time an egg could be counted as the same 'day' (based on the color and speckling we associate with each hen) it was still probably ten hours apart, at least, with the early egg overdue from the day before. This was more common when we first started keeping them in, like one of the hens had tried to 'hold it' and layed late.

 

[PeepsCA]

LOL too funny about their daddy bein' named Yeti... Hmm, maybe from all this hatching I've lost my mind and gained some psychic abilities? (I wish! Pretty much just lost my mind, lol).

I made some of my keets mad at me tonight, I caught them, put em in a bucket and took pics

The first is a pic of the 2 that I think are what the typical/common Chocolates should look like as they feather out... but they are lookin' more Blondish to me (pictured with a Pied Royal Purple, for color comparison). I should have went out to my outdoor brooder and grabbed my Blonde for a pic too, but it's cold and raining out (I think it's a male, not sure yet tho), so maybe tomorrow. He/she's quite a bit lighter than the lighter Chocolate below tho.
Still hoping I have a male/female pair of these 2... whatever color it is, lol.



And here's my 3 "reddish" Chocolates, that are normal to my flocks, but maybe "golden" is a better descriptive term...

They are all growin' so fast, I should be taking more pics, more often, I wanted to have good pic records of how they all feather out.
One of the youngest is turning out to be Pied (see the dorky looking white wing feathers growin' in all catty-whompered, lol). That will be a really pretty bird. Hope it's a Hen so it stays dark like the rest of my Chocolate Hens!

 

[Zootopia]

Hatch #9, 23 more keets


There's a really light Buff (male probably) and maybe a Blonde in there somewhere... (it's too dark to be a what I consider to be a Buff, but we'll see when it feathers out).

Doesn't seem like I'm only hatching once a week does it?

You guys gettin' sick of my hatch pics yet?

I want one of those, and 2 of those, and maybe--- 3 of those, Oh I just want ALL of them!!

 

[PeepsCA]

I want one of those, and 2 of those, and maybe--- 3 of those, Oh I just want ALL of them!!

LOL, sure, come get them! I'm having a really hard time not keeping every keet I hatch

. Last season I had 60 keets pulled aside as keepers, I narrowed it down to just 28 by winter time, and now that's who's layin' the eggs that all these pretty babies are hatching from so far. Guess I kept the right 28 huh?

 

[PeepsCA]

I mentioned I thought there was a Blonde and a Buff in that last hatch somewhere in the bucket...
So here they are close up, but I dunno if that's what they are or not now that I am gettin' a good look at them. The darker keet is a little too light to be a Blonde (I think), but it's really dark for a Buff (my normal Buffs anyway)... and the lighter keet is really light for a Buff

I'm going blurry/cross eyed trying to see if there's really broken/squiggley stripes on it's head or not... my brain wants to see them, so part of the time I think I can kinda see them, lol. But then it kind of looks a lot like Country Chicken's Ivory keet she posted earlier in this thread too, (but my keet's lighter). Do you guys see any faint broken/squiggley lines on it's head???

Sheesh, I thought I was doing pretty good being able to ID all 782 of my keets that I hatched last season, this season's workin' me hard with new to me colors and I'm not even 200 keets into the season so far!!!