Quick animal update! As some of you know, we have quite an assortment of animals at our house. Besides the 16 chickens, we have one dog (Kelsey), one cat (Bowie) and some fish. With Sam’s mom moving back home from Arkansas, we’ve added a few more to the mix. She is staying at a friend’s so we are taking care of her animals until we’re all settled (aka: we buy our house and she moves back in here).
I’ve only gotten a couple pictures since they’re all still a bit nervous from the move. There’s 2 new inside cats, Loke and Kelly. They are both gorgeous and quite fluffy but Loke is by far the larger of the 2. Here she is but this picture does not do her girth justice. It’s pretty amazing so I’ll try to get another shot soon.
Kelly is more skittish. She likes to hang out between the bed and the wall but has started sleeping on the bed sometimes at night. No pictures of Kelly yet.
Daisy is the new dog around town. She stays in the front yard, away from the chickens, but will probably come inside once the colder weather arrives. She’s a sweet girl, energetic but well behaved. We were slow to introduce Daisy to Kelsey. Because Kelsey is so submissive, there’s always a chance that new dogs will bully her. Luckily, when Sam and I took the dogs for a long walk yesterday, they sniffed butts a couple times on the sly but otherwise ignored each other. Here’s a shot of Daisy and some other ones I took while we were walking. It’s slowly starting to head into autumn so there’s splashes of color everywhere 🙂
Beyond the new additions, we have a BIG announcement! Wicket, one of the pullets we added in this spring, has gone broody!! This means she sitting on eggs and (hopefully) will hatch them out towards the end of October! How egg-citing is that?! It’s even bigger news since 1) Wicket isn’t even a year old yet and 2) she an Ameraucana. Ameraucanas rarely go broody and, from what I’ve read online, have a reputation for being bad mothers. Hopefully, Wicket will rock out but we’ll have to watch her once the chicks are born to see how she handles it. We weren’t really planning to add to the flock so soon but decided to see how things go. We’ve given her 4 eggs. Since we only have 1 rooster, we know who the dad is. Gertie is an Ameraucana so we gave Wicket one bright blue eggs knowing this will be a pure Ameraucana. (Either Chewy or Athena will be the mom.)
The other 3 were harder choices but they will all be Easter Eggers. The general opinion is that Easter Eggers are any chickens that are part Ameraucana so they have the blue layers gene. The eggs are blue mixed with whatever the other breed lays. (Dark chocolate eggs from Marans mixed with blue gives you army green.) We can’t bred Derp because of her scissor beak so Derp and Nervous Nelly were both out. Their eggs are too similar to tell part.
The Golden Comets are commercial layers which means they tend to have more health problems but we really like a lot of their personality traits. Plus, those girls will eat ANYTHING whereas the Ameraucanas are picky. We decided to try one egg from them. The Dominiques and Black Australorps have similar eggs but we wanted both of those in the mix too. Sam thinks the Dominiques lay rounder eggs while the Australorps are larger and more oval so we toss one of each in the nest. We’ll see what happens! I’ll leave you with a (slightyly dark) video of Wicket being broody in her nest box. I love the noise she makes, like a tiny little Raptor!
Sam Squared 