But wait! There’s more!
Last one! Meet the test egg. I usually call her Baby.
My incubator came before my Ebay eggs and I wanted to test out the functions, so I pinched an egg from my own flock to experiment with.
Incubators do three things: heat, humidity and turn the eggs regularly. Well, some of them don’t do that last thing and you have to do it by hand, but I got a good one. 100% hatch, y’all.
When the eggs came and it was all ready to go, I thought “what the heck?” and left the test egg in with the others. I really didn’t think, after all the handling, it would hatch.
I was very excited when I candled the eggs on day 7 and Baby was swimming around inside. Yes, they do that. Freaked me right out.
So this is the child of Sam and Millie. He’s off-white, she’s mille fleur and Baby is the same silver color as Spoon. Chicken genetics are very complicated.
She’s much smaller than the polands. She’s smaller than the other pekins, even (she came from a tiny egg from a young hen, so it’s not surprising). But she can see and the polands can’t, so she runs rings around them. And me. Flighty little miss.
And that is my flock: nine chickens. Four male, five female. Four pekins, five polands. I have comfortable accommodations for six, so things are a little tight.
Back to normal next week, but I got one more weekend and I’m going to laze right through it. Happy Friday!
January 3, 2020 — 8:15 pm
Comments: 8
My girl
This is my girl Spoon. She’s my favorite chicken, though goodness knows why. She’s almost been the death of me twice.
She went through a phase where she had to sleep as high up as possible. This meant me, with chest infection, hauling myself up a ladder to retrieve her from the roof of the garage. Next, she got so far up the roof of the house that I had to knock her off with a stick and catch her in mid-air. (I couldn’t really leave her to come down on her own. She would have fluttered down at dawn and been easy pickings for senor fox).
Spoon gets locked in early now.
There was nothing written on her shell and I was kind of named out. She’s an overall silvery color. I was going to go with Sterling, but I thought that was a dumb name for a chicken, so Spoon it is.
Chicken folk call this color ‘self blue’. Self, because her crest is the same color as her body, and the silvery color is bluish, I guess. I forgot to mention yesterday that Albert is a white-crested blue.
If you’re keeping count, that’s the three pekins and the six polands accounted for.
January 2, 2020 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 3
Saved the big boy for New Year’s Day
The fourth and final cockerel: Albert. You get a sense of the scale of him standing next to Po. He was always double the size of the other chicks; I’m not convinced he’s a bantam. Bear in mind this was months ago, he’s much bigger and shaggier now.
He did actually have Pol written on his shell, and that’s what I called him until he developed that giant, preposterous white crest.
You’d think being such a great hulk he could defend himself, but no. Before I had to separate the boys completely, I would frequently come out to find Albert missing. The pekin boys would have chased him right out of the garden, and I had to trudge around the neighborhood in welly boots calling his name, to find him standing someplace awkward, patiently waiting for me. It usually involved stinging nettles.
He’s a sweetheart, but he’s too big for my flock. Too big for the girls, too big for the cages. I had someone lined up to take him, but she had another cockerel foisted on her the week before. It didn’t work out.
I do the best that I can for him, but it’s awkward.
p.s. he goose-steps.
January 1, 2020 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 3