June 28th, 2013 §
Today marks the halfway point in the incubation of the chicken eggs. It’s been ten days since I placed them under the hens, and my most respected chicken resource states that eggs incubated under broodies usually hatch in twenty days instead of the 21 days for mechanically incubated eggs. We shall see. As it is things aren’t looking awesome in the brood coops, and my confidence in the viability of these hatches is waning.
One of the eggs in Oregano’s coop was broken when I checked earlier in the week, and then yesterday I found the broken shell of a Coronation Sussex egg—the prettiest one of the bunch. Boo.
I don’t know if they are breaking on their own because they are rotten or if she’s cracking (and possibly eating) them. That nest box didn’t smell horribly of rotten egg, so I suspect the egg was fertile when broken. However, I don’t know how many days it would take under the hen for an infertile egg to spoil. So that’s the situation in Oregano’s coop. She’s been getting off the nest, as evidenced by her “deposits” in the cage, and has lost a lot of weight already. Broody hens generally don’t eat much while sitting, and if they do get off the nest their poo has such a strange and horrible smell that it’s enough to gag you just walking into a room with it. Needless to say I remove it as soon as it’s discovered, to keep flies off it and to get it out of my life and into the compost pile.
Over in Dahlia’s coop, I found a major mess in her nest box. One of the olive egger eggs placed under her was broken, and it had made a horrid fermented/cooked mess in the nest. At least five of the ten remaining eggs were coated in dried egg goo. Not good, for several reasons. The incubating egg is a living vessel, and its shell needs to be clean to allow air to pass in to the developing embryo. To seal the pores of the egg could suffocate the embryo.
I was at a loss as to what do. I know the embryos need air, but I also know that to wash an egg is to remove its “bloom” or protective covering that helps keep bacteria out of the egg. In this case, though, I figured washing was probably the lesser of two evil decisions, so I gently scrubbed the dried egg off the dirty eggs.
Oregano had a few dirty eggs too, so I touched those up as well, trying to just wash the dirtiest areas. Then I cleaned out Dahlia’s stinking messy nest, filling it with clean pine shavings. I made notes in my log of which eggs I washed, which may be telling around hatch day.
Of course I started this project before suiting up with gloves, and the stink that was on those eggs was so strong I couldn’t get it off my fingers all night despite multiple scrubbings and soaking in lemon juice. In all, it was a fittingly disgusting ending to an evening that began by killing a black widow in the crawlspace. Ugh.
Tonight it was time to candle the eggs, which means I shine a light through them to see if they are developing into chicks. I made a candler out of a MagLight flashlight (with fresh batteries) topped by a taped-on piece of cardboard to concentrate the beam and cushion the eggs.
Then after dark I headed out to the garage to candle the eggs. All I needed was my candler, my record log and pencil, and a small dish to hold the eggs as I pulled them from the nest. I waited for the garage door lights to go off and began with Oregano’s eggs.
I removed each egg from under Oregano, enduring a peck on the wrist each time, bless her. I held the egg over the end of the candler, turning it until I could see something, or nothing. Most eggs looked like this, below, with some murky shape with no clearly defined blood vessels but perhaps the hint of a developing eye. Perhaps because many of them are Black Copper Marans eggs, which are dark to begin with and thus more difficult to candle.You can clearly see the air sack at the bottom of the egg.
Here’s an egg in which you can see some veins and perhaps a developing eye, right on the line between shadow and light.
Here’s an egg, unfortunately one of the two remaining olive egger (Oregano’s) eggs, that I think has no development:
Here’s a Black Copper Marans egg that appeared very porous. This porosity is thought to be an indication of a poor egg for hatching.
The clearest picture came from the last egg I candled, a Coronation Sussex under Dahlia. You can definitely see a healthy pattern of veins, and as I watched, I could even see the embryo moving within the shell.
I have to admit that holding this egg in my hand, in the dark, and seeing those veins pulse is a pretty freaking incredible feeling. It’s scary, to hold such perfectly planned beauty alive within that fragile shell.
Out of the 20 remaining eggs, there is only one (the olive egger) that I feel I can conclusively describe as not developing. The rest are big question marks, and I am not yet experienced enough to discard any eggs based on my judgement. I feel better about the clutch under Dahlia, my Black Copper Marans, than the clutch under Oregano, my olive egger. But that’s just a hunch. So they will all stay put in the nest, and we will wait the ten more days to see what becomes of them. As you can already tell, a lot can happen in the next ten days. And so I remind myself, and you, dear reader: “Don’t count your chickens until they hatch.”
June 21st, 2013 §
It’s the longest, lightest day of the year, and a lovely one at that. I spent the afternoon processing strawberries picked yesterday in Nelson County.
Summer fruits are the best, but you know what’s even better? Strawberry shortcake, baking in the oven right now. And the chickens definitely enjoyed the strawberry trimmings!
I’ve got a couple of growlers of Devil’s Backbone in the fridge and new friends on the way with fried chicken. We’re doing this Solstice up right with a good old-fashioned porch party on this beautiful evening.
Whatever you’re up to today, I hope you get a chance to celebrate the Solstice. And lest the sun hog all the astronomical attention, don’t forget to check out this weekend’s Supermoon!
June 20th, 2013 §
Just want to report that both broody hens seem to have accepted their clutches. Despite dreaming Tuesday night that I awoke to find they had smashed all the eggs, everything was quiet when I opened the garage. Both hens are in the broody zombie state, and all looks good.
I forgot to mention a little ringer I threw into this project, just to keep it interesting. On Tuesday afternoon I met a lady at a gas station off Route 29 in Madison for a quick deal. She jumped out of a maroon minivan with a taped-over tail light as I pulled up behind the building. She handed me an egg carton containing six eggs, I forked over a $20, and lickety split, we separated and hit the road in different directions.
It was at its heart a true CraigsList deal. A few e-mails exchanged beforehand, a quick phone call, an arrangement to meet at a blessedly public place. My prize? Six Coronation Sussex hatching eggs.
Now, if you’re not familiar with the Coronation Sussex, allow me to introduce you:
(Photo from BJs Poultry)
Pretty chickens, huh?
The eggs I bought supposedly come from Greenfire Farms lines, and you can read all about them and see more photos here. However, as with any CraigsList deal, you can never know. They could be store-bought eggs pulled from the fridge minutes before flying out the door. And, as with the purchase of any hatching eggs, one is never guaranteed a success. Don’t count your chickens…
Regardless of these known unknowns, I figured I’d give it a try. I’m not in the business of maintaining any fancy chicken bloodlines, so if I get a couple of pretty birds out of the deal that’s good enough for me!
Oh, and a very exciting possible farm development is underway. On Saturday I am visiting a farm over the mountain to talk to a lady about some baby goats. To, you know…just…visit…
Stay tuned!
June 18th, 2013 §
There are just a few intimate acts that are on par with reaching, in the dark, beneath a broody hen’s body, into the damp heat of her defeathered breast, feeling for eggs that pulse with embroynic blood. My years of developing film and photographs in the darkroom served me well as I navigated by feel alone. Oregano gave me a few good pecks on the wrist, bless her defensive spirit, and Dahlia let loose with a series of low perturbed squawks as I mussed about beneath her.
I took Oregano’s sacrifical eggs from her and and placed them in an old cardboard box grabbed off the garage floor, stretching as I did through the sticky web of a mother spider guarding her egg sac.
And then I replaced the stolen neverbabies with twelve fresh eggs for Oregano and eleven for Dahlia, of all colors and shapes, with a prayer for the suspended lives within.
And the 21-day countdown begins toward life or no life. It all comes down to the proper application of heat and humidity. Amazing, every time.
June 17th, 2013 §
Ever since April I’ve been hoping one of my hens would go broody and hatch some chicks. Why? Because baby chicks are some of the things that make life worth living, of course. That and I am seriously curious to see what kind of crosses would result from my Wheaten Ameraucana rooster over Black Copper Marans, Lavender Orpingtons, a Barred Olive Egger, and whatever mix Lilac and Iris are (Black Australorps and Mottled Java, according to their breeder).* Iris and Lilac are in their second year of lay, and it’s good to have younger pullets coming along to take over egg-laying duties. And finally, now that I am free-ranging the birds outside most days, I anticipate that at some point I will have predator loss and don’t want to be caught out with not enough laying hens to keep eggs in the fridge.
A broody hen is a wonderful creature because she manages all the care, feeding, and warming of young chicks. If you have ever raised chicks, you know that it’s a big, messy job to monitor their brooder temperature, clean up after them, keep them safe from drafts and predators, and make sure they get enough to drink and eat. So I told myself that the only way I would raise chicks this year was if a hen did all the work for me!
Last year Iris went unbreakably broody and I ended up giving her a clutch of fertile guinea eggs. She brooded them in a dog crate in the garage and hatched out and raised nine guineas. Here’s one at several weeks old, posing for its CraigsList portrait:
I got to watch the hatch and meet the still-damp keets, and it was one of the neatest days of my life. But this year, Iris has chosen to not do it again. Being trapped in a small cage with nine flighty, frantic, velociraptor-looking guinea keets was probably enough for her to sign off on motherhood forever. Not that I blame her—check out how those ravenous minidinosaurs are eying up their adopted mother’s toes while Iris pleads with her eyes for a Calgon moment.
The most time-tested way to induce broodiness in a hen is to let eggs accumulate in the nest box. When the hen feels a growing clutch beneath her, some hormone switches in her brain that tells her to buckle down and brood. She will remain on the nest, barely eating and drinking, and will often pull feathers out of her breast so that she can keep the eggs tucked right next to her bare skin.
For weeks now I’ve been letting eggs accumulate, rotating out the older ones after a day or two in order to keep some in the fridge. I also placed the infamous glass eggs in the nests to trick the hens in to thinking there were always eggs waiting for a mother. And finally, it started to look like a few of then hens were beginning to feel broody.
Oregano, my beautiful barred olive egger, was the first to show any sort of devotion. After she’d been on the nest about a week, I fixed up a broody coop in the garage and built her a cardboard brood nest. It’s best to have a hen incubate eggs and raise chicks in a quiet, private place away from the bustle of the main coop, where flock mates may see new babies as tasty hors d’oeuvres. I was waiting for nightfall to move her to her new home when one of my Black Copper Marans saw the nest was exposed and jumped up to sit on the eggs.
After dark, when I went to collect Oregano, the Black Copper Marans was still sitting tight on the eggs. One look and I got her message: She wanted a clutch of her own.
Oregano had assumed a broody position in the adjoining nest box. So I grabbed her and moved her and the eggs into the garage coop.
Oregano accepted her new nest and has stayed on it since Friday.
But the Black Copper Marans was still sitting on the glass eggs. And so I fixed up a second broody coop in the garage, built another cardboard next box, and last night moved her into a brood cage next to Oregano. So now I have two broody hens.
I have been saving out eggs for a week or so now, and when I get numbers I am satisfied with I will remove the glass and sacrificial eggs from under the hens and replace them with these fresh eggs. That way all embryos will start to develop at once, and all chicks will hatch at the same time. It’s a bit sad as the eggs are developing under Oregano, but their job really is to just “hold” the hen in a broody mindset until the more valuable eggs are introduced.
I wasn’t really planning on trying to raise two clutches, but at the end of the day it’s not such a bad thing. It means I can hatch more eggs, which is good as there is no way of knowing what the fertility rate is amongst my hens’ eggs. And, if one of the hens begins incubating and gives up, I could move the most valuable eggs to the other hen and have her take over. Thus, I am waiting until the same night to give both hens their eggs, and then we will see what happens! There is still a lot that can go wrong in the 21 days it takes to cook a chick, but I am having fun working with my broodies. If you’d like to know more, allow me to refer you to this excellent article by my favorite author on all things chicken, Harvey Ussery: Working with Broody Hens.
*A quick digression on chicken breeds and egg color: I have the right set-up to produce olive eggers, which, as their name suggests, lay olive colored eggs. To make a nice olive egger, you need a dark brown egg-laying breed (such as Black Copper Marans) mixed with a blue egg laying breed (Wheaten Ameraucana—my rooster). My Black Copper Marans don’t lay very dark eggs and I have no idea what sort of blue egg genetics my rooster carries, so I don’t suspect I will break any records with any pullets I hatch from that combination. But at the very least, I should end up with some sort of green egg, which is plenty exciting to me.
Now here is where it gets interesting. I have three eggs saved out from Oregano, my barred olive egger (the green eggs in the photo above). She does lay a very nice olive-colored egg, when she lays. By crossing her with Calabrese, and his blue egg genes, I may end up with a pullet that lays a really green egg, as opposed to an olive egg. But who knows, really? I have read about chicken genetics until I fell over from confusion and still am not sure what will happen. Mostly because I know nothing about the genetics of the birds I am starting with, other than their supposed breeds and what color eggs the hens lay now. And there’s always the possibility that I will hatch 100% cockerels and then the whole experiment is good for nothing but the freezer. And even if I do hatch pullets, it will be another year until they lay and who knows if I will even be in to chickens then!
May 29th, 2013 §
I stepped out on the front porch early this morning and what should I see but Cora, my once-scalped Wheaten Ameraucana hen, strutting across the front yard. That’s weird, I thought. Maybe I shut up the coop last night before she had a chance to get inside? But then, oh crap, I realized, I had totally forgotten to close the coop at sunset.
Cue the sick sinking feeling I was describing in yesterday’s post. Visions of a chicken massacre scene ran through my head, all red blood and multicolored feathers spattered in the coop. My entire flock dead and either dragged into the woods by the fox or eaten where they fell by the marauding raccoon or dog or whatever.
But just then the rest of the flock came strutting around the corner of the house, where I assume they had been enjoying their first uncooped sunrise. I did a quick, heart-in-throat scan, and found only one black chicken to be missing: Lilac.
I quickly recalculated the damage potential in my head. Losing Lilac would be, well, a loss, but she was one of my two oldest hens and her laying days were shorter than those of the younger birds. And then I remembered one important thing about Lilac: she’s my most consistent layer.
I ran to the coop, steeling myself for a possibly messy scene. But there was Lilac, hunkered in the nesting box, working on laying today’s egg. I have never been more relieved to see a hen on the nest.
All’s well that ends well, but I definitely messed up. I really lucked out last night that no birds were killed. I need to be a more vigilant chicken keeper, and I’m setting a daily close-the-coop phone alarm today!
March 26th, 2013 §
Chickens close their eyes while pecking!
February 5th, 2013 §
One upside of attending to my Lavender Orpington’s wound on Sunday was that I discovered she had lice. And when I snagged Oregano, my barred olive egger, for inspection I saw that she too had a few creepy crawlies. It was time for an intervention.
With a healthy flock, regular dust bathing will keep most parasites at bay. But in winter, with its frozen or muddy ground, the birds aren’t able to dust bathe as much as in the warmer seasons. This gives lice a chance to populate the birds. If unchecked, these blood-sucking parasites will deplete a bird to the point where it dies.
Thankfully my flock was no where near that stage. Yet, after spending a night researching various treatments I decided to go straight for the chemical intervention and not waste my time with more “natural” or “organic” methods. I really wanted to nip this infestation in the bud, particularly as it’s still winter and the birds need all the energy they produce just to keep warm and regrow the feathers they’ve lost. And, in another few weeks (if I can get Iris to go broody again) I’d like to try hatching some eggs, which means all my birds should be as healthy as possible and louse-free to avoid passing the bugs on to more-vulnerable chicks.
So I picked up a can of poultry dust, which is a permethrin-based formulation that you may have used for insects in your vegetable garden. I assembled my tools:
I also suited up in latex gloves and a dust mask. Well, the gloves were a joke because it took just one kick of a captured chicken to shred them. I went through five pairs through this process and still ended up covered in dust. If you’re concerned about skin contact, I’d suggest heavier gloves for this job. And, really, with all the flapping and wind I ended up covered with this dust so if you are truly concerned it may not be the treatment for you to use.
Cora, the Wheaten Ameraucana hen, was the first I caught in the coop. Following the advice of a YouTube video, I flipped her on her back. This seemed to calm her enough that I could powder under her wings, a favorite parasite hiding spot. I held her upside down to work the powder in to the feathers under her vent, which is where I saw the lice in all my birds.
Lilac was up next.
And so on through the flock. I left the injured Lavender until last so I could inspect her wound. It was open and bleeding, which I prefer to closed and infected, and seemed a tiny bit smaller than on Sunday.
I packed it full of neosporin before dusting her.
Now that’s a Lavender Orpington!
With the flock dusted, I did some housekeeping in the coop. I sprinkled food-grade diatomaceous earth in the nest boxes, in the chicken food, and filled a litter box with the stuff for dust-bathing in the coop. The diatomaceous earth, which is actually decomposed hard-shelled algae, acts in a mechanical manner (as opposed to chemical) on insects by slicing open their soft bodies, killing them.
And with that the delousing procedure was complete. Now I get to look forward to ten days from now, when I repeat the powdering to kill any nits that will have hatched since today. Fun times!
February 3rd, 2013 §
If you are sickened by chicken wound pictures or first aid, this would be the post to skip.
This morning as I let the chickens out to range, I grabbed my smaller Lavender Orpington hen as she came out of the coop. I’d knew she had a wound for at least a couple of months, and I’d been watching it. I suspect that without feathers to protect her back, courtesy of my feather-picking hen, my rooster had sliced the Lavender’s back with his claws when he mounted her. What had been a small black hole was now a wound the size of a golf ball, hidden behind her wing.
Today, for the first time, the wound smelled bad. And when I flipped the hen over, I found a messy bottom and some sort of infestation in the fluffy feathers under her vent.
With her missing back feathers, purple Blu-Kote stains, a huge necrotic wound, and some sort of insect problem, this chick was a mess.
The evidence for culling her mounted as I considered her performance. This hen wasn’t a great layer, always depositing smallish eggs on the coop floor where they usually grew dirty enough that I fed them right to my dog. I’d made up my mind I didn’t want to continue to keep Lavender Orpingtons because I found their super-fluffy butt feathers to be always collecting poop and debris. And if she hadn’t managed to heal her back wound, did I really want to continue her genetics in my barnyard mix?
But what started as a snowy day had turned sunny, so I returned the hen to the flock for one last day of free ranging before I did the deed. And in the ensuing hours I thought about how I would. I had settled on beheading by branch lopper when I went out around noon to give the chickens the goodies in the compost bucket. When they saw me they all came running, including Dead Hen Walking. When I shook the compost around the garden, she was just as active as the other birds. I stood watching her for a long time, and when my feet finally grew too cold to stay outside any longer I had decided to put some effort into healing this bird.
With eight laying hens, two of which aren’t very stellar in their production rate, this Lavender’s dirty eggs represented a big percentage of my flock’s output. And I’d recently decided to free range my birds as much as possible, and thus some of her value lies in her insect control ability and manure production. Plus, I am fully expecting some predator loss during ranging. After considering the time and expense and food and care that I’ve put in to this bird since I got her in June, to get her grown and laying, it seemed foolish to cull her if she was still up and about and acting fine—even though the last thing I wanted to do was nurse another chicken.
But nurse her I did. I caught her and brought her into the surgery, my laundry room sink. I filled her back wound with peroxide while I soaked her dirty bum feathers in warm water. I scrubbed her clean with dog shampoo and then used needle-nosed pliers to remove the feathers that were caked with the eggs sacs of what I later found out were chicken lice. Underneath her plucked feathers she looked very much like the start of a supermarket dinner. When her back wound had softened I scrubbed it out with a disinfected toothbrush, loosening the blackened tissue and rinsing it down the drain. Then I alternated rinsing peroxide and providone iodine in the wound.
And through what must have been a horribly painful event, this blessed little hen put up nary a struggle. I’ve found my Lavender Orpingtons to be the sweetest, slowest, and most docile of all the breeds I keep, and her demeanor definitely showed through this treatment. She even seemed to enjoy the warm water soak.
When I had her cleaned up as best as I could, I got the hair dryer and blew her dry. I didn’t want her to get chilled when I returned her to the coop, and she bore this treatment with good graces that none of my other pets possess.
I worked on her until she began to smell of rotisserie, and then squirted even more iodine into her wound. Then I wrapped her in a towel and took her outside.
There she got a good spray of Blu-Kote to discourage her flock mates from pecking her bleeding, reddened skin. Then I released her into the coop. And within one second my rooster jumped on her back to mate. That kind of pissed me off, so I knocked him away and left them to their lives.
I don’t know if I will be able to get this hen’s back wound to heal, but I will keep trying. If Cora taught me anything it’s that chickens are incredibly resilient. Tomorrow I am going to get some diatomaceous earth and create a dusting box for the birds. Apparently chicken lice populations bloom in winter when the birds can’t dust bathe because of frozen or muddy ground. So I will start as conservatively as possible to treat the lice, keep an eye on the Lavender hen, continue allowing the birds out to free range as much as possible, and dream of spring.
January 25th, 2013 §
of the season. Up before sunrise yesterday for a very cold walk. It was six degrees here at 6:30 a.m. the previous morning. Winter has finally arrived, and I am straying from the wood stove only to fill the bird feeders and defrost the chicken water.
The neatest thing was seeing all the fox tracks in the snow. I haven’t seen a fox in ages and thought they’d ceded the yard to Tucker in their canine turf war. However, they left tons of evidence that they are very much still in residence. Here’s where they went under the chicken coop.
And poked around the clean out door, no doubt sniffing the delicious dinner sleepily roosting just out of reach.
And failing to gain entry, they hopped into the little run behind the coop to try their luck with that side!
But I have the nicest, tightest coop in the East, thanks to my dad and a heatwave construction blitz, so the fox had to look elsewhere for its meal.
It’s eighteen degrees and snowing again now, and looking downright wintery outside. It’s hard to believe that just a few days ago Tucker and I were enjoying 72-degree days and the sunrise at the beach!
