The McMurray chicks are getting bigger; the one pictured above is Dragonfly, a black frizzle cochin bantam, who I hope and pray is a hen. I already have a rooster!
The little black-and-white lady below is one of my mottled cochin bantams. "Smallfry" is the name I gave her as a chick---she has yet to outlive, or outgrow the title.
This beautiful spangled chicken is Toby---one of my game-mutts from the test-hatch.
Many of the younger chickens are roosting in Mom's fruit trees now; they're eating the fruit---but getting the bugs too! Perhaps they'll lower the population enough that next year when they're too fat to get in the branches and eat all the fruit---there won't be as many bugs and the fruit can grow unhindered?
My game-mutt chickens are even more to blame then the McMurray birds. And they're better at flying.
My beautiful oprington pair has been getting more ambitious: wandering around the whole lot, and catching beetles. They look somewhat regal, but are the clumsiest chickens I remember ever seeing.
The only problems I'm having with my chickens right now is low egg production, and more deaths! I lost two of my birds (a bantam rooster, and a game hen) to a disease with similar symptoms to the Plague that already wrecked the flock. The hen died before I started to administer treatment---it caught me by surprise, I though that maybe her lethargy was "heat" related. It had been scorching the couple of days before. When I noticed my rooster Remus was starting to get sick, a quarantined him, and started treating him with tetracycline (which I used to wipe out the Plague.) He didn't pull through, sadly.
This morning, I noticed one of my hulsey chicks seemed sick. The symptoms were all too unsurprising. Ruffled feathers, hunched back, low wings, dazed look, loss of balance, sudden "tameness", over-all lethargy, unwillingness to drink, and thin breast. I brought the little feller inside, and he's been babied in my room all day, under a broodlight, in a nice little box. At first I was having to rub his throat, and force him to drink his medicated water; he's starting to take it more willingly now, and has even eaten a bit since this afternoon. He's not completely recovered, but has perked up. Fingers crossed that he is the last bird to start ill: I think some of the trouble is that he and his kin nearly all died in the big thunderstorm we had. My Dad very nicely went out and collected them from their pen while I was sleeping, and brought them under a light to get warm. He took care of them until he was sure they were better, which I am very, very grateful for! I slept most of the time---I was really out of it.
So through the trauma of that night, I figure the hulseys will temporarily be more open to disease. The shock, cold, and wet was probably enough to get them sick on their own, ignoring the sneaky little disease that seems intent on attacking my family's birds.
Me and Quinn cleaned out the coops and rotated pens today though! Hopefully that will help: the coops needed it, especially the Bantam Coop after that rain!
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