The Jury is In

When you order baby chicks from McMurray Hatchery, they offer to throw an extra one in for free. They don't tell you on any of the paperwork what breed or sex the extra chick is, so it's up to you to look at your 26 babies for the odd man (or woman) out.

In our first batch, we only knew that we had six things that originally looked like buff orpingtons, but as the orpingtons developed light rust-colored feathers, one of the number came up with pure white feathers. And on top of that, she wasn't even chicken-shaped! Because she had the distinctive ear feathers of the araucanas, I figured that's what she was, and our suspicions have been bourne out by her first egg.


It came on Thursday, and was a very light, creamy greenish color that our camera was, despite many attempts, unable to fully capture. The Pirate and I had occasion to go to the hardware store and spent some time in the paint department picking paint chips just so that we would be able to find a color that actually looks like our eggs. What we came up with is Ralph Lauren's color VM117, which is called "Celery," although it looks nothing like celery, being instead a very pale, creamy green. Perhaps it looks like cream of asparagus soup, but I'm sure that that would never fly as the name of a paint color.

So it turns out that our little chicken is not only an araucana, but a designer araucana, no less! Well, to paraphrase the old tuna commercials, I don't want chickens with good taste. I just want chickens that taste good.

SuperChicken!

I went down this evening to muck out the coop, like I do every night. Got that? I do it every night - I see these chicks every night and most afternoons, too. And tonight, when I went down there, they were noticeably bigger than they had been the night before. A whole lot bigger. But it wasn't all the chicks. Just the Cornish crosses. Those chicks are scary huge. To be honest about it, I'm a little creeped out. They mob the feeder when I put it down at night, even though it's only been gone for 15 minutes. They spend all their time laying around while the other chicks skitter, fly and play. They just don't seem natural to me.


You can see that the Cornish cross is easily three times the size of the black australorp. The hilarious thing is that when they're all outside, the big ones try to bully the little ones, and the little ones fly right over them. It's funny, in a sad kind of way.



In fact, the Cornish crosses are growing so fast, their outsides can't keep up with their insides. The australorps and araucanas are completely covered by their little feathers. Their wings look fully-feathered and their bodies are completely covered. But look here - large portions of this Cornish cross are NAKED. The little meatball looks like a fourth-grader in a first-grader's feathers. So...I've got a coopful of Baby Hueys on my hands. I'm just hoping that they all make it another 6-8 weeks and that they taste good, because this is getting weird.

Chickies' Day Out

Today was the first day that the little chickies could leave the coop. But before we could let them out into their designated chickie yard, we had some fortification to do.

First, I dug a shallow trench around the inside perimeter of the smaller chicken run. Then I took gopher netting (which is like chicken wire, but with stronger wire and much smaller holes) and put it around the bottom two feet of the run. Then the Pirate took some scalloped edging bricks and put them around the inside, just in the trench, then tamped the soil down around them. It sounds like something that would take about half an hour, except that it took more like three and a half hours.

Then it was time to let the baby chicks out for the first time.


Note that they're having none of it. I'm just on the other side of that wall, grabbing the chicks and placing them at the door, but they're NOT going out. After snapping a couple of pictures, the Pirate took pity on me and just reached his hand in and started grabbing the chicks and putting them on the ground. When he grabbed the first one, I don't know who was more startled - me or the chick!


Once they had all been put outside, they were less than impressed. They all sort of huddled just outside the coop door, wondering what they'd done to deserve being snatched from the comfy warmth of their nice coop and put outside in the mud. I'm sure all the peeping they did was the chicken equivalent of "jerks." There was one tiny little araucana who made a break for it - she grabbed hold of the gopher wire with her claws, and by flapping her little wings, climbed up the fence until she got to the chicken wire, whose holes are larger than her entire body. She was halfway through, trying to push her way free by the time I came out of the coop.


And we weren't the only ones enjoying the show. One of the silver-laced wyandottes kept pacing back and forth and looking into the yard. It was weird - like watching someone visiting their kids at a playground. Or maybe in prison.


The silver lace wasn't the only one displaying curiosity. Finally the whole crowd gathered around to see the chicks. They didn't display any hostility, just curiosity. I can't say that I blame them - they've been living in the house, separated by nothing but a sheet of plywood, for two weeks now. It's like hearing your neighbors making weird noises upstairs for weeks and weeks and then finally seeing them in the flesh.

Before they know it, they won't just be neighbors, they'll be roommates.

Like a weekend at the beach

I grew up (mostly) in a beach town in southern California. Every weekend, people from inland would flood the town, trying to get to the beach. The strand was always swarming with people (except for when it was raining) and most locals just stayed away from the beach during the weekends. I learned to drive there, and I never drove in town if I could help it -- a bicycle was almost always faster than a car, since parking spaces were astonishingly scarce. I did notice, though, that after a long, rainy winter, the first couple of sunny weekends would be especially bad, with locals on the beach as well as tourists. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that today, our chickens have seen sun and when I let them out of the run into the yard, they headed for the dust like people headed for the beach.

I had been going to let them out this morning, but the power supply for my MacBook Pro exploded. One minute I was sitting at the table eating my breakfast, the next I was carrying a leaking and smelly power supply outside. Instead of letting the chickens out, I spent a couple of hours driving to the mall and getting a new power supply. When I got home, I set up a deck chair in the driveway and let the chickens roam free. No neighbor dog will get to the chickens on my watch, believe you me.

I was also hanging out, waiting for a delivery truck. After a couple years of sleeping on an increasingly lumpy mattress, we bought a new mattress and it was delivered today. Yay! But when the delivery truck was close, I wanted to put the chickens away since I'd be in and out of the house, and it's still my watch. They were remarkably complacent about going back into the run, though. I suppose that nearly three hours of dust bathing had satisfied them; when they got back in the run, they mobbed the feeding trough. I tell you, man, those chickens: big, fat crops.

When the mattress delivery guys left, I went out onto the deck to read a book for a little while, and peered over the railing to see how the chickens were getting on. Arthur (who'd been jumping all over the hens at the dirt spa) was surrounded by several Lucies and Sarah. Isn't he the popular one? One of the araucana chicks looks a little like he did when he was a chick, so maybe we'll have an Arthur-looking hen. Wouldn't that be cool?


Cargill, on the other hand, had taken the literal high ground and perched himself on top of the ramada over the waterer. All the chickens are out basking in the sun and seem to be quite happy that it's not raining on them. It's starting to cloud up, though. As with the beach, the locals are probably going to head inside soon.

The Good Old Days

Anyone who is the parent of two or more children who are not twins does a lot of mental comparing. Not in a bad way, mind you. It's more like "How old was Johnny when he first walked?" "How old was Susie when she started talking?" It's a natural thing.

I've been doing a lot of mental comparisons with the last group of chicks, and I think that my memory isn't quite perfect. For instance, I recall the baby chicks eating out of our hands from nearly day one. This batch won't come near me, no matter what I hold out to them. This evening I took some fresh blackberries down with me when I went to tuck everyone in for the night, and despite the fact that I stayed there kneeling on the hard floor with my hand full of berries there in the shavings, they weren't coming anywhere near. They just had no curiosity about the berries at all. Even after I put one down in the shavings and took my hand away, they weren't interested. They pushed at it and stepped on it, but it didn't look like food to them.

Then there's the poop issue. The last lot were in a slightly larger enclosure, but even so, they only needed their shavings to be changed every other day. This group need to be changed daily. DAILY. That's a lot of poop. And, even though they're only a week old, these aren't the cute little draps of baby poop that the other little chicks left. These are miniature chicken turds. They are NOT CUTE.

Now, where does all this poop come from? The old chicks got fed twice a day - morning and night. In that time, they would have gone through approximately half the food in the feeders, and we'd top them off because the lower down the food got, the harder it was to reach. This batch is cleaning the feeders out two and a half times a day. I say two and a half because the food dishes are empty in the morning when we first go down, they're empty again when the kid comes home from school and feeds them, and they're half empty four hours later when they're shut up for the night. It's not unusual to see one of the chicks with its head in the trough, fast asleep.

I'm trying to recall when the last batch of chicks first started testing their wings. I seem to recall that it was at least two weeks before the chicks started trying to fly. As I was squatting there in the coop, holding still so they'd take the stupid blackberries, I watched one of the australorps do a power-assisted hop up onto the waterer, which is fully three times his height. Then I realized that all the chicks were doing little power-assisted hops and I was immediately grateful that the cardboard shutting them into their little area of the coop is fully two feet high. It'll be at least another week before they can get over that. And even if they do, the wall separating them from the rest of the henhouse is four feet tall. Even the adult chickens can't hop it.

It might be time to extend the coop a little.

April Fool Eggs

Since Saturday, March 25th, we've been getting eggs. Not reliably, mind you, but eggs. We're pretty sure that right now, we've got two laying hens, both Barred Rocks.

This Saturday, though, things got a little weird.

We got our usual two eggs, and I took them upstairs and put them into the bowl. Then, when I was down in the chicken run later in the afternoon, I noticed yellow liquid on the ground. My initial thought was that one of the chickens has some sort of really severe intestinal distress. Healthy chicken poop is firm and dark. Unhealthy chicken poop is loose and much lighter. This was yellow liquid - not a good sign at all. The only other possibility, though, was even worse - we've got an egg eater.

I called the Pirate downstairs and got his opinion. He thought it was an egg, and thought the same thing I did - that we've got an egg eater. Peaches came downstairs to see what the fuss was about, and she pointed out a whole, perfect egg under the waterer. Perfect, that is, except for one thing. It had no shell. It was a perfect little blob of goo with an unbroken yolk, just laying there in a depression on the ground. I realized that the other egg didn't have any shell near it either. I can't conceive of any animal breaking an egg and eating every single scrap of the shell and leaving the yolk behind, so we've formulated a new theory - one of our hens laid two eggs without shells.

I looked up in our chicken books what could be causing it. There are a few ailments that in rare cases cause hens to lay without shells, but the chickens show no other signs of illness. I'm even more worried because Sunday, we got only one egg. That's not terribly unusual, but I'm concerned about Miss No-Shell.

We're keeping an eye out.

Chicken Compactor

Chickens take up a lot of room. Even after you cut off the head and feet, take off the feathers and relieve them of most of their internal organs, they have a certain mass.

I took all the chickens out of the freezer and spent Sunday morning with bowls, cutting boards and poultry shears, removing the meat from the chickens. Then we put it through the grinder and reduced it to ground chickens. In half the ground meat, we put apples, cranberries and onions; in the other half, we put apricots, ginger and garlic. We piped them into sausage casings. The bones were put into the stockpot and rendered into five quarts of very nice-smelling stock. The sausages were steamed so that when we're ready to eat them, they'll be pre-cooked. So, what was taking up fully a quarter of my chest freezer downstairs is now taking up two-thirds of a shelf in the fridge.

And, in time, will take up considerably less!