Little Miss' 9th Birthday Cake

1st broody's chicks at 1 week

Here are some pics of the first batch of chicks at 1 week old - these are marans chicks, 2 cuckoo, 2 copper black. 

Chicks - the final count

Well our 2nd broody ended up with 7 baby chicks; 5 cream legbars, 1 araucana, 1copper blue marans.

Here are some pics of her chicks:

And here are the two new chicks - the blue-silver one at the back is the araucana, and the blue-grey one at the front is the copper blue marans:

2nd Hatch! (so far)

Well after a near disaster with our 2nd broody's eggs, she finally has some chicks to raise!

She has 5 Cream Legbar chicks hatched so far and 5 eggs yet to hatch (3 more Cream Legbars and 2 Araucanas)

Aren't they cute!

Our first hatch!!!

Well hatch day has arrived!!! Our Cuckoo Marans has successfully hatched 4 baby marans chicks!!! woohoo!! one is brown (so will be wheaten in colour) and the other 3 are black (and will be either cuckoo or copper black).

I managed to get a picture of 3 of them:

Oh and I finally got a few pics of all 4 of them:

Hatching Eggs

Here are some of the hatching eggs we are going to put under our broody hens

On the left we have Copper Blue Marans eggs and on the right - the brown ones are a cross between Copper Blue Marans (hens)and Araucana (cockeral). The light coloured ones (they are actually blue, but hard to see in the picture) are Cream Legbar eggs.

Should be fun fun fun around here in 3 weeks time when they hatch :D

Growing chicks and broody hens

Here are some pics of our meat chicks - now 9weeks old

And now 2 of our hens have gone broody!


Cuckoo

Henrietta

Eggs eggs eggs!

We've got a lot of eggs now!  So here is what we decided to do:

Vid of the chicks

Here is a little video of the baby chicks...



And soon, we are going to have a new member to our our flock of hens!.... More later :)

baby chicks are here!

These cute little fluffies won't stay this way for long...

Soon they will be big, fat, white birds ready to put on the table!

There are 6 chicks, but some of them were under the electric hen (the heater to keep them warm).  And the adventurous one on top of the electric hen - he jumped up there himself!!!

What next??

Well, we've had about 16 or so eggs over the last 2 weeks.  Not bad from just 2 of our hens.  They are still young yet and just getting into the swing of things.  Looking forward to the other girls coming into lay!  Those eggs were scrummy! :D

But now that we have gotten settled with the hens, we started thinking - what else, what next?  We've got a good little set up with our laying hens (once they start laying! LOL).... so that's breakfast sorted - but what about dinner??

So.... Big Mr built this:

It's a brooding box!  the big black square is the "Electric Hen" which radiates heat down below and the chicks hide under it for warmth, as they would a mother hen.  There is cardboard around the edges to prevent the chicks from huddling in a corner and accidently smothering one another.  There is room at the other end for the feeder and drinker.  I also have a wire mesh grating for the lid, to prevent them from jumping out.

We've decided to order day-old "table birds"!  They arrive next Friday.... and should be ready for the table ;) in about 3 months time.

Fun fun fun!

Our first Egg!!!

One of our Maran hens laid an egg today!!! I don't know which one, but I suspect the Wheaten hen.

More chickens!

We got a couple more chickens today - 1 Wheaten Marans and 1 Cuckoo Marans - the cuckoo is the black speckled one.

 

  

Aren't they gorgeous???

And here is one from our first set... she is SO curious about everything.

 

Here is a pic of our coop and run all put together.  Once they settle in, they will be allowed to roam in the garden as well.