Journee's Critters

So here are a couple pictures of the whole brood residing in my bedroom at the moment...Rico, Muffin-Face, Lassie, and Little Rock, plus the three orpingtons, and the other eight lavender ameraucana bantams!

 Everybody is doing very well, except for one small incident when I came into the room to find Ghost in the brooder, and one chick (Lav Amer Bant: LAB) missing. I looked everywhere for her, but no luck, and found her the next day, sick-looking, but seemingly uninjured. I didn't think she was going to make it, but watered her and put her under the brood-light, and she's really perked up! Still a little dazed, but no worse off then any of the other chicks.

Rico, the white-crested black polish bantam (WCBPB) is are wily as ever, and is starting to get some "real feathers" in his crest. I'm going to be taking better pictures of each couple of chicks sometime soon (when the nice lightning and warm weather comes back) so you can see. :)

Muffin-Face, the large fowl white ameraucana chick, is also doing well, and is quite large, and growing fast. Her beard is hilarious, and still keeping form even as her nice big wing-feathers are coming in.

 The blue/black/splash (BBS) orpingtons are growing, and all look exactly the same, feather-color wise (I can tell the difference between the three judging by the black marks on their beaks.) I've been researching the colors, and my first response was that they're all going to be blue---but will they? They seem to be coming in black. Every-other "blue" chicken I've had always starts to feather-in blue, right off the bat. I guess it's possible that these guys will molt into blue, but it seems unlikely at this point...from my stand-point, they seem to be awfully dark, and if they're blue, well, it's a very blackish shade.

Also, the orpingtons have pasty-bum, which is very weird for breeder-quality birds---and it's only the orpingtons! Which means it can't be what I'm feeding them... I'd like to get more BBS orpingtons, but, I don't think I'm getting more from the breeder I got these babies from.

 I love these lavender ameraucana bantams; they are so, so cute, and though a bit flighty (and loud!) they are well-tempered, and not mean like that little show-off Rico, (I bet you anything that rascal's a rooster! He'd be a pretty spirited hen, I'll say!)

They also have the prettiest color coming in, sort of like a smokey grayish color. Lassie (the runt, and first one hatched) is actually more purple then the others.

They all (minus Lassie, go figure) have big fat muffs, and beards too: like little cotton-balls stuck their faces.

And they're very tiny; a few have all-greenish(blueish) legs, but a couple have pink mixed in, which isn't really preferred when it comes to the breed standard, but they'll likely grow out of it a bit, and I'm not showing these birds anyways. :)

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As for the incubator...well, the last three bantam eggs never hatched, so they got thrown out, and I cleaned everything up---and good thing, too, because it looks like I'm going to be getting some pumpkin hulsey hatching eggs! For those of you that might not know, the pumpkin hulsey chicken is a type of game-bird that was originally created by a man named E.H. Hulsey who was a famous "cocker" (cock-fighter) from Texas that was slowly beginning to lose cockfights because his birds lacked the strength and hitting power necessary to win. His stock-line was started from a single rooster, of unknown genetics, that was pumpkin-colored, and seemed to house all the perfect traits of a game-fighter. From that chicken, he managed to breed a whole line of those chickens.

Now, since cock-fighting is mostly illegal (lol), they are used as show-birds, and free-range birds. They remain to be a very strong and fearless, and some people say that they are capable of fighting off many different predators, such as hawks. They are also supposed to be good at flying, and so make good birds to let loose and do their thing in the woods----able to sleep in trees.

A friend of my Mom's breeds these birds to sell, and because he's awesome, and thinks my Mom is awesome, he's going to give me ten eggs free of charge to hatch, and when I emailed him last he said he should be able to have them ready in a day or so. And that was yesterday. So! Perhaps my incubator will be busy yet again? I haven't even bothered boxing it up, and it residing ready-to-serve in my bedroom.

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I'm happy to be getting more eggs, and have been fighting off the urge to get more and more eggs since the lavender ameraucanas started to stop hatching so frequently. I found a very impressive breeder of BBS sumatras.
http://www.signaturefeathers.com/sumatra/sumatra.html
A rare, and very elegant breed that was also, probably, imported into the US for cockfighting, but is now used mainly for show. The birds this particular breeder owns are gorgeous, and I'm quite tempted to get some, but know I need to hold off, and not get anymore chickens for quite some time. *Heaves dramatic sigh*

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I also found a small, family-owned hatchery that sells a breed called partridge penedesenca.
http://goldenwillowfarmhatchery.webs.com/darkbrownegglayers.htm
I've never heard of them until today, but they seem interesting. Another rare breed, they were originally a Spanish breed, and were bred for their interesting comb-type, and also their very dark brown eggs.

Another tempting investment that I must. not. look. at. again.

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Besides all of that, our outside flock has been doing well also; about every game-hen we own is brooding, including under under the steps in the garage---who is sitting on 4+ eggs, and will not move.

Our egg production did drop for a while, until we were getting a minimum of seven eggs---but has now come back up after a bumped their food, wormed them, and started feeding them oyster shells again. We've gotten eighteen eggs so far today.

We did lose our last mottled houdan chicken (a hen) a few days ago, pulled through the roost during the night---or daytime?---probably by a raccoon. We only found the feathers; it's kinda sad, but Indy and Willow were absolutely convinced that because our Colombian wyandotte hens were both alive (my first guess when I heard that there were black and white feathers out there) that the feathers must be from a wild chicken! And that was funny. They brought some inside and washed them, and protected them, because they came from a "wild chicken."

Then I got home from CAP and went out there to look----and after a few moment of deep, blond thought, came to the conclusion that it was NOT in fact, a wild chicken, and instead our poor little houdan hen.

And you know, the wire under the roost was all bent out of shape, which means that chicken had been on the inside. So...not a wild one. Darn. I was going to pick up chicken wrangling again!

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All the babies and ducklings that are staying in the Bantam Coop are doing good too, though after that big rain...well...let's just say that next nice day I've got some cleaning to do!

My bantams all look pretty scruffy though; the mottled cochins look rather pathetic, and a couple (roosters) even look a bit sick. They haven't feathered in hardly at all! To be honest, I'm not real impressed with McMurrary Hatchery's stock this year; half of the standard pullets my Mom got squashed themselves and died. Dumb birds.

So. Now that I've hatched my own chicks, I'm firmly decided against ordering hatchery chicks again. We've gotten nice birds from McMurrary before, but this year's been bad, and I'd much rather get my own from private breeders, and get hatching eggs instead of chicks if they're not local.

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So that's the gist, congratulations to you if you bothered read through that whole thing. :)