Those are my chickens looking out of their coop pophole door. They're utterly traumatized by the snow. You see the one on the right giving the snow a dirty look? I imagine she's thinking, "Girls, do not go outside right now. The sky is falling. It's falling. From the sky. And it's covering the ground. It burns your feet if you walk on it. This is just the worst thing that has ever happened."
I've raised them all from chicks or hatched them from eggs so they're only just barely old enough to lay. Soon we'll be getting lots of eggs and my daughter, entrepreneurial soul that she is, already has big plans for her egg business.
This is the girl that laid this egg when she was younger, back in October.
It all started with some fertile eggs I bought. Everyone always asks me where I buy my fertile eggs, imagining me navigating some intricate underground network of chicken breeders. The answer: "eBay."
Being a simple girl, I wanted blue eggs, brown eggs, white eggs, chocolate brown eggs, green eggs, blue-green eggs, speckled eggs, moss eggs, cream eggs, small eggs, large eggs…I think that's about it.
The sad truth is that most of the chicks I hatched (and I had horrible hatches this time) died due to the cold nights. They huddled too closely for warmth and smothered each other to death. It happens that chickens have a little bit of a hard life.
Sometimes I get frustrated with things in my life, like migraines or "my husband hasn't been home much" or "I'm going to cry if I have one more snow day with my ADHD child" (these actually sound like they should be hashtags) or "this cold, gray day makes me feel like I'm dying inside…I think I have seasonal affective depression". And then, honest to goodness, totally not lying, I think, "I could have been a chicken. This cold could have killed me instead of just made me a little sad." That's the point that I decide I'll take my first world human problems gladly. And that is also why, folks, I get invited to mad amounts of parties. Because I am just a barrel full of joy and fun. I freely admit that my chickens live in a better situation than many humans. Just continuing the fun here.
The white chicks above are chickens we bought to raise to eat. We actually did it and I have to tell you that they are delicious. I highly recommend it to anyone curious to try. We tried the meat bird crosses from McMurray that grow extremely large chicken breasts (this sounds so profane) and thighs. They get so heavy by the end of 10 weeks that they can hardly walk. That's when you process them and throw them into the freezer. People have asked if I named them. They were all named either "Nugget" or "Drumstick" so as to not confuse them.
This one below is a little barred rock chick.
This one below is either "Nugget" or "Drumstick," it's hard to tell. (Yes, that was a joke.) Seriously, it's three weeks younger than that barred rock above and just look at how much bigger it is already. They were behemoth.
This one below was either a Danish Brown Leghorn or a Welsummer…hard to tell.
These two below are very interesting. They are Cream Legbars and they lay blue eggs! Very large light blue eggs, in fact. They also are autosexing which means that you can tell the males apart from the females as soon as they hatch without having to look into their vents. (I don't recommend vent sexing…I thought I could teach myself how and three chicks died in my hands from the trauma of it. They are ticking time bombs. You have two seconds to look into their vent and know exactly what you're looking at before they pass out from stress. That was four years ago and I'll never try it again.) Given the difficulty of vent sexing and realizing that you could wait as long as six months to be able to tell your roos from your hens, autosexing is such a neat genetic trait.
The chick on the left is a boy. He does not have the "chipmunk" strip pattern and also has a white dot on his head. The chick on the right is the female with the "chipmunk" coloration pattern. You can see them below as well, male on left and female on right.
That furry thing in the bottom left corner is Demeter the Terrible. Here she is below.
She looks cute but don't be fooled. She may be loyal and loving but she won't obey you and she sure as hell will tear your birds to pieces and eat them up when you're not looking. I always took her into the coop with me so she would learn that they are my birds. She learned that they are my birds alright and she won't even look at them when I'm there. But if I go inside, then my birds mean tasty treat for Demeter.
Anyway, here are the Cream Legbars grown up. Leroy is the roo in the back corner and the girl is to his right with a small crest on her head. Her name is Babs.
Leroy is in the bottom right corner down here and Babs is to his left.
These chicks above are cute, little Tolbunt frizzle Polish chickens. They have a crazy top hat and their feathers are frizzled, meaning they curve up and out instead of down over their body. They look like they had the craziest hair day when grown. Sadly, they both died.
It was rainy the day I took these photos. I looked out the coop window and saw my son patiently waiting outside.
The shed on the left is my coop. I think I am going to name it Highcluck Cottage. (The castle used for Downton Abbey is named "Highclere Castle.") The barn, on the right, is where my other animals bed for the night. I had the overhang turned into separate pens for breeding purposes and for the turkeys.
I used one of the pens to raise the meat flock.
All kidding aside, it was actually very hard to process and eat these guys. They were so friendly and sweet. If it wasn't for the fact that they were lumbering to walk and were going to suffer injuries from their size, I don't think I could have done it. Now that we have though, I think we can do it again. I have never quite known this peace of mind of knowing that what I ate was given the kindest life possible, that their last day on Earth was a happy one in the sunshine, and that they are clean of hormones, disease, and other questionable substances. I hadn't realized how much I thought about it when I ate until I sat down to eat our first homegrown chicken dinner and that space of my mind that would go through all the questions was suddenly blank. Suddenly, I had one less thing to worry about. It's humbling to eat what you raised.
But let's get back to the eggs. This is my expensive Amish community nesting box. Don't buy it. The chickens do not share the box like they are supposed to. Instead, they lay everywhere else and we go through an Easter egg hunt daily looking for eggs. We found four under the straw in the llama pen one day.
You can see one brown egg through the curtain in the nesting box. There is a Brown Leghorn in the corner of the photo checking it out.
Uh oh. Look who else thinks the nesting box is interesting. Hmmm. This might have something to do with why some of the chickens won't lay in it.
The front of the box is a tray where the eggs are supposed to roll into and stay nice and clean. It doesn't work that way if there is straw in the nesting box but I'm trying to train the chickens to lay in there right now.
If it did work, this is what I would find when I open the tray.
So, if there is a take away lesson from all this, it's to not vent-sex your chicks and that chickens give you perspective on what's important in life. Also, don't hatch eggs in the fall. You just don't need the guilty conscience of all those chicky deaths. And this concludes all things chicken. Hope you enjoyed the tour!
