Rumpless AND Tufted!

Our first rumpless and tufted Araucana that we hatched ourselves! 

The Araucana we hatched out last week is not only rumpless, but he/she is also double-tufted.  The right side of the face has a larger white tuft - and the left side has a thin black tuft.  The placement of the tufts don't match perfectly.  However, I'm so happy to see those tufts.

Any suggestions for names?

For anyone who is curious:  The Araucana breed of chicken came the United States from Chile. They were first bred by the Araucanian Indians in Chile - which is where they got their name.

The Aracauna has three distinguishing characteristics:  (1) It is rumpless (missing the last vertebrae and thus lacking a tail); (2) it has feather tufts near each ear; and (3) it lays a blue egg.
Both the rumpless feature and the tufts feature don't appear on all Araucana. 

I have one hen that has a tuft on one side of her face.  Then I have two that have no tufts at all.  I hatched out two other Araucanas back in December - neither have tufts and only one is rumpless.  The other one has 4 or 5 feathers sticking out in the back.  It's rather funny looking!

So I'm really thrilled to have my first rumpless and double-tufted Araucana.  I have more Araucana eggs in the incubator - and hopefully within a few weeks I'll have more rumpless and tufted chicks.

Hello and Buh-bye!

First the Hello!
I've had chicks hatching this week.  I wrote earlier about our first grandchick.  So far we have 1 rumpless Aracauna, 4 Easter Eggers (from our own Leroy and assorted hens), and now 5 Exchequer Leghorns.  I ordered the leghorn eggs from a seller on eBay - and they did real well.  Out of nine eggs, 8 were growing when I last candled them.  I don't know why the other three didn't hatch.
 
Now the Buh-bye!
I sold my three black copper marans chicks today.  They were 8 weeks old and two of them were cockerels - which I definitely didn't want.  The woman who bought them (from Craigslist) wanted the pullet, too.  After I thought about it, I realized that the pullet by itself would have a hard time integrating into my layer flock.  So I decided to sell all three.  I still want a black copper marans pullet, but I will wait and get it when I get some other chicks so she'll have some buddies. I think a deep chocolate colored egg would look good with the other eggs I have.

I still want to get a gold laced wyandotte, a silver laced wyandotte, a speckled sussex and some other marans for the laying flock eventually. 

My original 7 chickens (Rosemary, Blackie, Oreo, Abby, Annabelle, Ariel, Willow) are a year old now.  By this time next year, they will be slowing down on laying, and I need to have others waiting to take over egg duty.  

Now the only chicks left in my grow-out pen are the 11 Swedish Flower Hens.  They are 7 weeks old now.  When they get about 12 weeks old, I'm going to move them into a coop by themselves.  They'll be my first breeder flock.  The Exchequer Leghorns that hatched this week will be my second breeder flock.  Then I have Blue Isbars, Cream Legbars and Rhodebars on their way soon from Greenfire Farms - and I also have some Isbars and Legbar eggs in the incubator.  So they will be my third, fourth and fifth breeder flocks.  

Successful Integration!

Yesterday was our big integration day!  We permanently put the seven chickens from the grow-out pen in with the larger flock.  I simply closed off the door to the grow-out pen yesterday morning.  The younger chickens spent the day out in the pen with the older chickens - with plenty of room and plenty of places to hide if one of the older chickens pecked at them.  The day went along with minimal pecking as they began working out the new pecking order.

As nighttime fell, several of the younger chickens went right up to the big roost with the others.  There were three that seemed lost and stayed near the door to the grow-out pen - obviously wanting to go back to their familiar roosting place.  I had to physically pick them up and place them on the roost.  Tonight they will most likely all go to the roost on their own.

In the younger flock I had one Swedish Flower Hen.  She is smaller than the other birds, and I noticed that she was being picked on more out in the run.  Since she was so small - I moved her back to the grow-out pen which by then was housing the chicks from the brooder.  The brooder chicks were 10 Swedish Flower Hens and 3 Black Copper Marans.  Since I would eventually put all the Swedish Flower Hens together anyway, and since there wasn't that big a difference in sizes, I felt it was a good time to put all the SFHs together.  And it worked!  When I checked on them later, they were all piled up together sleeping.

Now we have an empty brooder pen in the chicken house.  Later this week I'll clean it out - and soon the new chicks that are hatching will move from the brooder in our guest room into the brooder in the chicken house.

Busy day at Dogwood Trace Farm

First thing this morning, Ron went to the chicken house with me to catch the ten pullets that we were selling to a woman in a nearby town.  I tried catching them, but learned quickly that Ron is much more gifted in that area than I am.  In no time at all, he had caught all ten of them.  We had a box ready, and as he caught one, I'd lift the lid, and he'd gently place the chicken in the box.

Once all ten were in the box, he put it in the back of my SUV - and I was off to meet the buyer.   The buyer and her husband had just finished building their chicken coop and pen last week - and they were excited to be getting their chickens.  None of the pullets I sold her have started laying yet - but three of them should start laying in the next 2-4 weeks, and the other seven will start laying in a couple months.  She now has a very nice first flock - and when they all start laying, she'll have a beautiful and colorful basket of eggs.

With those ten chickens gone, we were left with only 7 chickens in our grow-out pen.  So I shooed those 7 chickens into the big pen - and then outside into the run.  It was very cold here today - never got above freezing.  However, all the chickens seemed to get along just fine in the outside pen/run.  The cold doesn't seem to bother them one bit!

When it started to get dark and the chicken came inside to roost, I noticed that several of the chickens from the grow-out pen went right up to the roost with the big chickens rather than go back into their pen.  The big chickens tried to chase them away, but two of them stood their ground and ended up in the big pen's roost for the night - and the other five returned to the old pen.   Tomorrow, they will no longer have access to the middle pen.

It is supposed to get down into the teens tonight.  So I asked Ron to put the heat lights into the overhead sockets in the chicken house.  There's a heat light in the brooder pen, too.  So altogether there are three heat bulbs in the chicken house tonight. 

So it's been a fruit-basket-turn-over kind of day in the chicken house - 10 chickens sold, 7 chickens moved into another pen.  Tomorrow the grow-out pen will be cleaned and prepared - and then the 13 chickens in the brooder pen will move into the grow-out pen.

Right now in the brooder box (in our house next to the incubator in the downstairs guest room), we have 4 chicks.  Over the next three weeks, we'll (hopefully) have more chicks to hatch.  Then they will all go into the newly emptied brooder pen in the chicken house.

Our First Grandchick

My first grandchick is here!  Leroy, our Easter Egger rooster, and Abby, one of our Easter Egger hens, are the proud new parents of this precious little chick.  He/she hatched today, and is already running around the brooder. Leroy and Abby are unaware of their accomplishment. 

This means that Easter Eggers will be the first kind of hatching eggs I'll offer for sale.

First Araucana Egg

One of our three Araucana pullets laid her first egg on Saturday (February 4th - age 24 wks, 6 days).  She laid again on Sunday - skipped Monday - laid her third egg today.  The eggs are still small, of course, but they're such a pretty blue color.  No green at all - just a clear blue.  Can't wait for the eggs to get bigger.  The other two pullets still haven't started laying.  They are now over 25 weeks old.  So they need to GET BUSY!  One of them (Whiskers) has been "squatting" for over a month - and Leroy, the EE rooster, has certainly been mating with all three of the Araucana pullets for weeks now.  So the other two should lay soon. 

Now I have 8 active layers.  Can't wait for my first 8-egg day!

By the way, with the camera flash, the egg looked white.  So I played around with the photo editing software - and now it looks neon blue.  It really is a beautiful blue - but not quite as bright as the photo!

Working in the chicken house

Today was the day I decided to shovel out the pine shavings underneath the roosts in the chicken house, and replace them with sand.  In order to reach the area easily, I needed to remove a chicken ladder I had added up to a platform in the coop.  I got my hammer and used the claw end to pry up the board.  The above photo shows the result.  The board didn't move, but the hammer sure did.  I had to go out to the barn and look through Ron's tools to find a heavy duty hammer.

So I shoveled out all the pine shavings and droppings underneath the roosts.  I have a very large plastic bucket - and that thing was HEAVY!  I managed to get it outside, but I'll wait until tomorrow when I'm not so tired to lug it to the area where I've started my chicken droppings/pine shavings compost pile.  I had six bags of sand.  They were heavy, too.  Very heavy.  I barely managed to lift them up to the platform under the roosts.  I only needed three bags to make a 3-4 inch layer of sand.

So tomorrow I'll check to see how much poop was deposited overnight.  With 22 chicken roosting above that platform, I imagine it'll be a bunch!  I have a pooper scooper - and I'll see how practical it will be to scoop the poop every day or two.  If it's practical, it'll sure keep down any odor in the coop.

Since I was already dusty and dirty from changing out the pine shavings for sand, I decided to go ahead and clean out the entire coop.  I had let the people area of the coop get really cluttered!  We had worked on building the pen - and had just kinda piled stuff in there.  So I got it cleaned well, too.  I want to get a heavy duty vacuum to help control the dust.  An incredible amount of dust is created by chickens!

Leroy stays!

I made arrangements to meet a couple who wanted to buy Leroy - and they were willing to pay a pretty good price for an our beautiful Easter Egger roo.  I went out to the pen to catch him to put him in the pet carrier so I could go meet the buyers.  I couldn't catch him.  As I tried to catch him, I was thinking that I really hated to see him go.  He's a nice rooster - doesn't peck the other chickens and I love to hear him crow.   Ron came out to help me and remarked that he really had mixed feelings about selling Leroy - that he was nice to have around.  So we changed our minds.  I called the buyers and told them that we couldn't catch him - and that we'd decided we wanted to keep him anyway.

So Leroy stays!