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Archive for the ‘Animals’ Category

Cuteness Meter at 11

Posted in Animals, ducks on May 17, 2012| 1 Comment »

Between the ducklings and chicks there is just way to much cuteness going on!

Paddling Away

Looking for Fish?

The ducklings are getting big so fast. They are already bigger than the chicks, who are a week older. This past weekend we let them go for their first swim in the bathtub. They took to it immediately.

Grabbing a quick drink

Just like humans, the baby chicks are the first ones up in the morning. I’m sure the mommas are wishing they could sleep for just 15 more minutes 🙂

Two of Fancy’s chicks, and one of Priscilla’s

All the mommas working together to find food for the babies

All three mommas work together to take care of the chicks. It’s so cute to watch the group of them. I can’t see ever having less than two hens hatch chicks at a time.

Momma got a little over zealous with the digging

 

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One Week Chick Update

Posted in chickens on May 7, 2012| 3 Comments »

The chicks are a week old today, so it’s a good time for an update.

Cutest picture ever. I told my daughter she should enter this in the TCYS contest next year.

The chicks now go out with their mommas every day foraging.

Shirley with chick

We were worried at first, but the mommas are so protective. One of them actually attacked one of the ducks that got too close to her chicks yesterday.

Fancy with chicks

They can’t get back up the ramp, so we help the chicks back into the coop at night.

Priscilla’s chicks

Originally Fancy had 3 chicks and Priscilla had 2, but maybe Fancy realized that 3 were just too many to handle. She gave one of the chicks to Priscilla. The chick she gave away also looked very similar to Priscilla’s chick, so maybe it was easier than trying to figure out whose was whose.

Look at the fuzzy feet on this pure bred brahma

I added in this photo, just because I have no idea how my daughter managed to get our rooster to look like a lobster.

Lobster Chicken

Many of the photos were taken by my daughter, Aspen.

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New Duckling

Posted in Animals, ducks on May 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

After discovering a little too late that ducks take longer to hatch than chickens (28 vs 21 days), we had to borrow our friend’s incubator to finish the job, since momma hens had other important work to do.

On of our ducks, the Rouen, hatched this morning. The other 3 eggs have cracks in them, so hopefully will be soon to follow. I took a bunch of pictures of the progression. The pictures are through the incubator, so aren’t quite as clear as they could be.

The duck is already interacting with us, coming up to the glass when we look in.

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Poultry Yard Extension

Posted in chickens on May 7, 2012| 1 Comment »

Front View

It’s gotten to the point that we can no longer call it the chicken yard. With 9 ducks and 3 turkeys, poultry yard is a little more accurate. With all this poultry, it also means we needed more space. This weekend we built out an additional 40X40 space. We were able to finish in one day thanks to help from our friends Joan, Noah, and Logan!

Turkey Coop

We decided to go with a ready-made dog kennel for the turkey coop. We just need to add a roof and build a little shelter inside for them and we’ll be able to move them in.

View from inside

Once we secure the gate, we’ll be able to knock down this wall and the ducks and chickens will have free range. They’ll love it since there is actually a little green growing on this side.

Just for fun I took an updated picture of my backyard garden. I just removed the parsley and dill on Saturday, so wanted to have a comparison shot.

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Chick Crazy Week!

Posted in Animals, Chickens on April 30, 2012| 3 Comments »

Hungry?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we have been letting a few chickens hatch chicks. Well, this week we got results.

Last sunday our Seramas hatched 5 chicks.

Hera with day-old chick

One day later our friend, who had been incubating our serama eggs told us that she hadn’t been having much luck selling them (she lives out in BFE) and wanted us to give it a try. This resulted in 19 more 1-2 week old chicks showing up.

Breakfast Time

We also had someone else donate 6 serama chicks to us, which brought our grand total to 20 chicks! Some of these donated chicks were less than a week old so we decided to try letting the mommas raise them as well. This seemed to be a good idea the first night, but the next day the mommas attacked them so we had to pull the chicks out and put them in a separate brooder box.

While all of this was going on, we had 3 more chicks hatch. We don’t know who did it, but either our roo our one of the mommas killed a chick. It may be due to us bringing new chicks in the mix, or due to the chick being weak. I also read that when chicks are born several days apart that sometimes the chickens will kill the older chicks. We decided to remove the chicks, since we didn’t want to risk any more loss.

One of the chicks out foraging

There were two serama eggs left so we decided to let them try again. The chicks hatched and everything seemed to be going well. The family was out foraging, sun bathing and taking dust baths. Then for some unknown reason another chick was attacked. We were able to save this one, but not without injury. We will be keeping these two chicks separate for a while, since we don’t want the older chicks to attack the injured one. I don’t know if the seramas just aren’t cut out for this? I don’t know if we’ll let them try again, definitely not this year.

We’ve sold 12 chicks so far, so numbers are slowly going down. Thank goodness! We don’t need 30 chicks.

After the ups and downs of the seramas, things took an up turn today. We got two full size chicks.

First tiny hole. You can actually hear the chick peeping at this stage.

Looks to be half brahma, half rhode island red. This one is sitting under Priscilla.

This one looks to be full brahma. You can't tell from this photo, but the feet are completely feathered. This one is sitting under Fancy. Shirley is still waiting for hers.

If this wasn’t insane enough for one week, my husband brought home 3 turkeys today. The plan is to raise these for Thanksgiving. We just had posts put in this week and will be building a separate area for them next weekend.

Turkeys

We got a crash course in farm life this week. It seems you have to take the good with the bad, and be ready for the unexpected.

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