Firing up the Incubator

My husband gave me a gift a few months ago- the  gift of making babies whenever I want to.  Wait!  Don't leave! He got me a Hovabator incubator with an egg turner so I can hatch my own eggs. 

This is the most fun I've ever had with an appliance....I've hatched three batches of eggs so far.  Today my Ancona Duck Eggs arrived so I am waiting for them to reach room temperature so I can put them into the Bator. 

The Anconas are the Black and White spotted ones. 

I have two Anconas now, and they are really great ducks. They are cheerful and put up well with their pen.  It's too dangerous to let a duck free range in my neighborhood, so I need to have animals who are ok with living in a pen.  And I'm getting lots of eggs.  But I wanted to introduce some lighter patches into my strain of Ancona. So I bought some hatching eggs from a lady in Lawrence Ks via Ebay.  They came in the mail today.   There are nine of them.  I found 15 in my own ducks nest.  So I am going to incubate 24 eggs for 25 to 28 days.  If half of them hatch, that would be really good.  I would be inundated with ducks.  I will probably get far fewer. 

How Do I Get My Hens To Lay?

My Welsummer and Americauna pullets won’t lay an egg.  It’s very frustrating, because I’m going through a lot of feed, and they really should be old enough.  The three Americaunas were hatched on April 25^th- so they are 26 weeks old.  The Welsummers  are about 23 weeks old. 

My other pullets delivered right on time- around 22 weeks old, so I never read up on this before. Now I’m trying everything I can think of to put them into the mood.  I put a light bulb into the house, I’m feeding them very generously, I’m keeping the young birds in a separate pen so as to keep a calm atmosphere in the Big Coop.  Nothing.

They say the combs and wattles will begin turn red when a hen is ready to lay.  The Welsummers are beginning to pink up, the Americaunas are not. 

I’ve seen the Welsummers in the hen house checking out the layer box. I have always just had one big box, and all the girls laid in the same nest.  Maybe the new girls don’t like that.  So today I took an old milk crate out to the coop with  a little bed of straw in it. I stuck it in the coop.  Everyone rushed in to look at it.  New  furniture! 

I’m hoping for a breakthrough this week.  Even my husband has noticed that my flock is underperforming.  He asked if I couldn’t do something to make them go.  I told him I have serious conversations with them every morning about their purpose in life, the cost of feed, my performance expectations…They just aren’t very responsive.  I mean, they talk back, but they are kind of snarky. 

Any ideas?

Chickens and the Common Cold

When the nights grow colder, or even in the spring when the nights grow warmer, chickens tend to become ill.  I wasn't prepared for how fragile my flock was until one of my hens got a cough.

Chickens cough and sneeze and get runny noses.  Beaks. They get a rattle in their chest and start to look droopy and sleep during the day.  They don't try to get away when you go to pick them up. This little girl settled in against me like I was her mama.

 I went down to the local feed store and asked what I could do for my hen.  Unfortunately, no one there had any chicken experience.  So I called my vet.  They didn't work with chickens, so they couldn't help me.  I hit the internet and found www.backyardchickens.com, a fabulous resource for folks like me.

 I found a thread that described upper respiratory diseases in chickens, but there  was so much there I couldn't really diagnose the chicken or decide how to treat her.  By this time she was really sick, and dying.  I wrapped her in a towel and put her in a box on the dryer and she died that night.  And another chicken was sick.  Oddly enough, it was one of the same breed, a Buff Orpington.

My husband works with elderly people, many of whom have lived around here all their lives and kept chickens back in the day.  He described my problem to one of his ladies.  She told him the Buff Orpingtons are "delicate".  I Googled the breed and learned that their feathers do not repel water, like other chickens do.  Ah ha!  It was a rainy spring, and they got wet and took a chill. 

So I drove 25 miles to my local hatchery and asked them.  Hallelujah!  They knew. They sold me some stuff to put in the water and advised me to separate the sick chicken from the flock. By the time I had the right stuff and a plan, all three of the Buffs were dead, and it was too late for the Buffs.  But the other hens were just fine.  Good to know. 

The next time I had a sniffling chicken, I had antibiotics to give her immediately. I pulled her out into a crate  on the porch and nursed her back to health.  Truthfully, though, if a chicken gets this once she will get it again.  And it's not always by breed.  I have some very hardy Americaunas, but I brought home one batch that all came down with upper respiratory disorders.  This is a threat to the rest of the flock.  I don't want to breed those animals, I don't want to spread disease, so when the ill ones passed I was ok with that. 

So, what I learned was that to pull the sick ones out and isolate them.  Try to keep appropriate medication on hand, because the only way to save a hen is to treat her quickly.  If in doubt, call the folks who sold you the chickens.  They know the most about what kind of disease you might be dealing with and they have what you need to treat them.

Birds of a Feather.....

I have heard the old saying- birds of a feather flock together.  Until I spent time with chickens I didn't know how true it was.  I figured we were talking about chickens flocking, ducks congregating, but it's more specific than that. 

Birds of certain colorways and breeds stick together.  My three Welsummers travel together.. a threesome in all things, feeding, hiding, complaining.  My Buff Orpingtons slept together.  Birds who are able to identify another bird exactly the same breed as themselves stick together. 

My first few birds included a brown leghorn and a white leghorn.  They came from the same flock. The White Leghorn was the alpha female in my new flock, and the brown one was at the bottom- picked on and abused. When the brown one  became ill, the white hen herded her into a dog crate that I had near the hen house and stood guard against the other chickens. 

Chickens are mean to sick chickens.  There is some sort of instinct that they pursue to kill sick chickens.  They run them out of the house and let them die.  But Alpha ushered her friend into a box with food and straw and stood guard at the door.  In the end, the little brown hen died.  She had serious wounds from the rooster that she did not recover from, despite my best intentions. Still, I was impressed by Alpha's loyalty. 

So, birds of a feather really do stick together.  Unto death. 

The Flock

This has been such a great week on the farm.  The weather is gorgeous, we got some much needed rain, but it's not too muddy .  Not too hot, just cold enough to feel good.  I spent a lot of time in the yard with my poultry and my guardian animals- all of us just sitting in the sunshine. 

My flock is eclectic.  I have purchased birds at farms, at fairs, and at the hatchery.  I've hatched a few of my own, which is a whole other post.

Big Boy, Alpha, Mary Todd (in yellow) and her sister

I have a Rhode Island Red Rooster named Big Boy.  Big Boy was attacked by dogs last spring and is now sans tailfeathers.  He looks funny, but still fulfills his prime directive. The oldest chicken in my flock is Alpha, a bossy female White Leghorn who still lays one white egg a day. I think she must be 5 years old.  Amazing.  I have three Americauna hens, two Cinnamon Queens, one Golden Comet, and three little Welsummers in the big house. I have 6 little chickens- 3 months old, in the little chicken house, and three little hatchlings in my living room.



Left to right, Male Ancona, Female Welsh Harlequin and Female Ancona

There are three ducks, too.  A pair of Anconas and one Welsh Harlequin.  They are my husbands pets. Well, he really wants to eat some, but they are such good egg layers that we may breed them instead.  I bought them from a lady down the road who had a coyote kill most of her flock and wanted out of the duck biz.  It turns out that Anconas and Welsh Harlequins are rare and in danger of dying out so I don't think we will be eating them until we build a flock.  If then. 

I kind of have two flocks of chickens going.  The first one is my egg laying flock.  My goal is to get 300 eggs a year from each hen, and a variety of egg colors.  Some of my little hens are from my best layers, so I'm looking forward to strengthening the laying ability of my flock.  I have white eggs, pink, green, an occasional blue, brown and dark brown layers.  Pretty pretty eggs!


My second flock is of Welsummers. Welsummer is a dutch chicken- the chicken of Kelloggs Cornflakes fame is a Welsummer.  They are good layers of dark brown eggs, and they don't eat much.  They are also fairly uncommon.  They are very personable and chatty hens that follow me around if they have something to say.  And they have a lot to say.  They chew me out when I'm late with breakfast, or if I'm absent for a couple of days.  I have three hens in the big house, and two tiny roosters and a hen in the nursery right now. 

The winter will be harder- I'll be trying to keep the houses warm and the water unfrozen.  But right now it's perfect. 

 

First Ladies, Hen Aprons, and Chicken Mental Health

I originally intended to name my hens after the first ladies of the United States. The only one of them that I managed to apply that to, however, is Mary Todd. Mary Todd is a Cinnamon Queen, and she is the roosters favorite. Which means she is really rough looking. Chicken love is cruel and as a result she had severe feather loss on her back, wings and head. So, I made her an apron.

Mary Todd, Lower Right, in her apron.
The Americauna in the middle has one, too. 

 A Hen Apron, or chicken saddle, is a little cover that fastens to the hen with elastic and covers her injuries so that she can heal. Another way to deal with that is to remove the hen from the flock, but chickens get really unhappy when you take them away from the flock, and unhappy chickens sicken and die.

So, the apron. It was too cute. Yellow with blue Dragonflies. I put it on her one morning at breakfast. She didn't like it, but I whispered to her that she was in an abusive relationship and it was for her own good. Then I let her go. She sat very still for a second, hunkered down and began to walk backwards.   It was hysterical.

I had read that a chicken may react to the apron this way- trying to get out from under it by backing up.  Mary Todds reaction was extreme, however.  She not only walked backward, but she staggered a bit, too.  She began foraging with the other girls after a day or so, and seems to be eating and drinking normally.  But she just hasn't been the same since she got her apron, and she has sort of a strange look in her eye that reminds me of Mrs. Lincoln.  The apron may enhance the resemblance.  And she is still, weeks later, walking backwards.

 

Put some WD 40 On It

My friends have already heard this story, but just to follow up, Big Boy's legs are much improved.  He had Scaly Leg mite, which made his feet and legs inflamed and icky looking.  Icky. 

So, I tried a few things.  The first, a water based insecticide, didn't do much. Then I found a reference on the internet that said the cure is WD 40- you know, the lubricant.  Well, I have some of that handy, so Mike and I took the fishing net out to the coop and wrestled Big Boy upside down and sprayed him.  I did that myself, without my husbands help, twice more. 

My trout fishing net is now in three pieces, but Big Boys legs are looking pretty good.  The treatment is over, at least until a get a new fish net, but it looks like a success. 

When I step out on my porch in the morning I greet my dogs- hello, ladies, gentleman.  And then I call out, Good Morning Chickety Chickens!  and the crowd goes wild.  It's great.  Tails are wagging, chicks are clucking, even ducks put their two cents in.  If you want to be loved, get yourself some livestock....

We, and by that I mean I, with the help of my ever supportive husband, started a small flock of chickens.  I've had many adventures.  They were are educational.  Before this I only had cats- and a couple of dogs. If you have the room, chickens are a wonderful addition to your menagerie, but there are some things to know.  It's trickier than dogs and cats because most vets don't have any avian expertise.

Common practice is that chicken mortality is high, and there aren't many cures. There is only prevention.  So you learn  by screwing up.  I have inadvertently killed many chickens.  I loved them all. I raised them from chicks, kept them in my living room when they were tiny and cuddled them when they were ill.  They gave me eggs, and some hilarious diversion.  I've learned a lot- I was basically a city girl, and the world of animal husbandry is new to me.  I Googled most of it.  
Every other animal in the animal kingdom wants to have a chicken dinner, so there is that.  But I love them, and I currently keep about twenty chickens and 3 ducks on my Missouri Ozark homestead. 



My Hatchery Chicks, Spring 2012.