Whats been up lately

It has been a while since my last post!  I have been very busy at work and when I get home there is so much to do that I don't get back on the computer from home.  I will have to write more when I get some pictures to post, but the nutshell version is that Clover has been diagnosed with bone cancer in her face, most likely caused by the bad teeth.  It is progressing pretty fast, so I think we are measuring her life in weeks rather than months.  She seems pretty happy most of the time, although it is a challange to find something she wants to eat.  She still looks good but is loosing weight.  I feed her a lot of bread.  It settles her stomach and then she sometimes will eat kibble.

I have finally put all of my first batch of chicks outside in their temporary run.  They are integrating pretty well, but the last batch of 6 are still pretty scared of the bigger ones.  I think that one of my chicks will grow up to have blue eyes.  This might be a phase though, so I will watch her and see what happens.  The biggest ones, Americaunas, all have reddish orange eyes now, which is their adult eye color.  All the other ones have hazel eyes that will become that reddish orange as they age.  The blue eyed chick is pure white, so it will be interesting to see what happens.  I will post some pics later.

I have one easter egger chick who has double thumbs on both feet.  Pretty interesting!  I call her "Thumbs" as a name.  I don't really know if  she is male or female, but hope springs eternal, and I will hope for a hen.  Thumbs looks just like one of the Americaunas, only he doesn't have double thumbs.  I am assuming that he is a HE becasue he has a much larger comb starting than his hatchmates.  I need to catch them both and get a picture of them together.  The americaunas are beginning to grow their muffs, (beards/sideburns)  They are quite interesting to look at.

Yesterday I traumatized on of my poor NH hens.  She was filthy, for many months she has had leaky drippy bowels and her backside is always attracting flies. She always seems very healthy though, and is a good layer who eats and is active and does what she should do. The day before she and many of her sister hens escaped their coop/yard and she got a little beaten up by something or other.  I suspect that the other hens did it to her as she tried to lay an egg.  There were feathers everywhere, and her comb is pretty pecked looking and her back between the shoulders is pretty bare.  She didn't seem to be feeling well yesterday and I thought she might be egg bound.  All the reading I have done suggests a warm bath to relax her muscles so she can pass the egg.  She seemed to be a pretty mellow hen, easy to catch and handle, so I gave her a bath.  She had actually just laid an egg when I got her for her bath. While she wasn't happy about it, I did manage to get her pretty clean.  She was very easy to handle even after I let her go.  She just wandered into the storage area where the coop door is and asked to go back in.  Picked her up with no fuss and put her on the roost.  If she were feeling well I think I would have had a fight on my hands trying to catch her after such an affront to her dignity.  Poor girl.  I hope she is feeling better today.  Will check when I get home.  From the looks of what she is passing I wonder if she needs more calcium to form egg shells.  Her drippage looks like egg albumin, so I wonder if giving some more oyster shell will help her some.  Her egg from yesterday was very nice, good shell, good size, and she didn't make a big fuss laying it.  I guess that time will tell.  She was clean for a little while anyway.  I had been calling her "The dirty butt hen" but since my husband seems to object to such descriptions I changed it to "D.B." which quickly became "Debbie".  Makes sense to me, and it seems kind of girly so she might like it.

Purple still comes running to her name, and Boo Boo still aviods me which makes her hard to catch at night, but all is well with the two walking wounded hens.

I have another batch of chicks to pick up today or tomorrow, they will be RIR and Easter eggers.  We will have about 50 hens when they are fully grown.  Actually, some will be roosters, but I will eat those.  The person with whom I ordered this batch didn't get me sexed pullets, but he said that if I end up with roos, he will trade me hens for them.  We got a total of 100, so there should be some good hens in the bunch.  It is just a matter of raising them until we know which ones are egg layers and which are for eating.  I will keep one Americauna rooster if I have one (out of the 6)  My neighbor two doors down got the other 9 of them, so if he has a rooster, I can borrow him and have some semblance of genetic diversity as I allow a couple of hens to lay fertile eggs.  I would love to breed an Americauna with a New Jersy Giant and see what I get.  Americaunas are big birds, and NJGs are bigger.  It would be nice to have green egg layers and big meat birds in the same brood!  Oh well, i am not in a position to buy more birds this year, I am already at capacity.

More later!  Have a great day everyone!