Eggs, Eggs, Eggs!

I have a lot to update you guys on. Well, first, right after I stopped updating my blog Pearl died. We got Millie and Marigold. Millie is a Cream Legbar and she lays a blue/green egg.Marigold is a Swedish Flower hen and she lays an egg like Beatrice's which slowly got bigger until it is now fairly difficult to tell the two apart. The two got bullied a lot because Marigold wouldn't run, but nobody could catch Millie. Millie was also the best flyer and we had to clip her wings about she flew up onto the arbor we have in the backyard. It didn't change a whole lot, though.

 Millie is the blue egg-layer.

Then we got Opal. It was chicken math, get one chicken, then another, then 2 more, then another, until you have a big flock. Opal was giving my mum big sad eyes when she went to buy the girls some feed and she brought her home. The 2nd coop we had gotten for Marigold and Millie went to Opal and Penny because Penny has had bumble foot for awhile, which is a type of staph infection. She limps and is very half-hearted in her pecks so we thought she'd leave Opal alone. She does for the most part, but will peck Opal once in awhile.

 I'm going to guess you can tell which one is Millie's. The big white one in the left hand is Beatrice's, with Opal's smaller brown one and Betty's gigantic brown egg. Marigold's egg is lighter in color like Beatrice's and is next to Millie's and Penny's big brown egg is also in the right hand.

We get many eggs a week, as shown by the picture above. We don't buy store bought eggs at all anymore. Sometimes we fill up three cartons and run out of room! Betty's eggs barely even fit in the cartons they are so huge. We give some eggs away but keep most of them, we have an egg breakfast nearly every sunday. We also blow out Millie's beautiful blue eggs, by making pin holes in each end and blowing out the yolk. Although Opal recently destroyed around two dozen of those.

 She is from Sweden so she has a really nice beard and muffs.

 Betty with her little ruffled comb.

 Beatrice and Opal looking in on the kitchen.

 Opal loves to sun-bathe on the walkway.
Two of the things first time chicken keepers will freak out about are when their chickens sun and dust bathe. When they dust bathe it looks as if they are having a seizure. They use their wings to throw dust over them, it keeps them cool and suffocates mites and lice. For this reason we add sand and wood ash to their favorite dust bathing spots. When they sunbathe, though, it looks like they broke a leg. As you can see with Opal, they flop over on their side, put their legs and wing out, and arch their neck feathers. It is chicken nirvana. It doesn't last long, though. They are solar powered and only need to recharge their battery a little bit. 

 This is Betty in the house, on the COUCH.
Very early on when we began having the girls live in the outside coop they tried to get inside. Betty mastered the back door first, we used to keep the back door open so we had a little fly net type thing, and she found out how to get around it. She'd come inside, go outside, come inside, go outside. She would come in and sleep on the couch as you can see from the picture. Once she came inside, went up the stairs, went into my parent's room just to check on my mom before going back outside. They think they are house chickens and my mom only reinforced that idea when Betty got bumble foot. The vet said she shouldn't be outside on the concrete so much so we began bringing her in and letting her sit on the desk while my mom checked emails. Now she comes in, goes up the stairs, and sits on the desk alone. If we can't find one of the chickens outside we always find them inside.

Penny with her bustle fluffed out.

Blogger Life Ain't the Life For Me

Well, I haven't posted in a long while, maybe the blogger life isn't for me.

The chickens are doing very well, tragically Buffy died of the heat during the summer, and we bought two new chickens, Pearl, a Black Australorpe, and Beatrice, a Speckled Sussex. Pearl quickly replaced Betty as leader of the flock and Betty became bitter for this and beat on Beatrice constantly. But after awhile Pearl, too, died but of Fatty Liver Syndrome this time. It is common in pet chickens when they get too many treats and their liver breaks. There was nothing we could have done. So we got a Cream Legbar, Millicent and Marigold, a Swedish Flower hen. They became very much bullied by Beatrice because she had no guardian when she lost Pearl and thus became bottom chicken. We had to break up many beatings because Marigold would squat for her like she would for a rooster to show submission, but she'd sit on them, pecking them on the head. Millie was fast and able to escape.

Beatrice wouldn't stop so we split them up into a second run bought from Costco. That went well, they weren't trapped with bullies during work and school days. Later, though, we got ANOTHER chicken from a feed store, it just had a very sad look in it's eyes and we had to get it. It was a Black Australorpe, called Opal. She gets bullied by Marigold and Millie most even when she is bigger than Millie. She has adapted well, though, because she was used to flock life where she came from unlike Millie and Marigold. It is a very nice flock now, although bullying isn't uncommon still.