Babies having Babies

Having eighteen pullets and five roosters all "coming of age" at the same time makes for a whole lot of crazy.

Can you believe that these little fuzzballs are laying eggs of their own now?


March 6, 2011

The puberty wave has brought with it a few strange new experiences -

*Waking (and sometimes going to bed) to the sound of 5 frisky boys trying to out-warble one another. Thunder is the undisputed crowing champ. His crow is like a scratchy air raid siren, especially when unleashed within the confines of the coop. Eardrums bleeding now!

*The chicken edition of "I didn't know I was pregnant" playing itself out daily. Some of our ladies' nesting instincts have not quite caught up to their ovaries, catching them off guard and thus necessitating...

*...a daily Easter Egg hunt. A high-stakes game of find the egg, if you will. The challenge being to find every egg every day without fail, lest you should find one that has somehow escaped your notice for a day or two and sat baking in the August heat. No es bueno.

*Squabbles and kerfuffles over the "good" nest box. Sometimes there's a line. Sometimes the gals don't quite make it, and you find an egg or two where the queue had been. Sometimes desperation takes over, and two hens will squeeze their fluffy booties side by side into a one-hen nest, or, even more rarely, one will sit on top of the other, sidesaddle.

The gals do not always maintain a dignified air while waiting either. If one hen is perceived as taking too long to get the job done, the others will BOCK! their everlovin' heads off until they get their turn in the hot seat, or scramble to find a suitable last-minute replacement for the coveted nest box. Sometimes this is in a corner of their coop or a batted down tuft of grass in the yard. There have been a few times that they have laid eggs under the new coop or, mysteriously, on the "wrong" side of the fence. (Are they escaping the yard, laying, then coming back? Or do they simply aim their derrieres to the south and pop an egg through the 4x4 fence, and into the great, wide world?)

Who can say? All I know is that chickens are generally under-appreciated for their entertainment value. Romances, bitter feuds, babies out of wedlock - it's like an episode of All My Children over here.

A Sampling of our lovlies ~


Curlie, the frizzled Polish Roo, looking, err... not his best.


Amelia the Americauna, in the highly-coveted nest box. Amelia is our super-jumbo egg layer. We're talking 4 oz eggs! Go Melie, go.


Beanie, one of our two Turken hens. Her sister, Vulture, looks the same, but has greenish black feathering like the Australorps.


Thunder, mid-crow, as ever.


Chick-Chick, our only white Americauna and the leader of the pack.


Blackberry, an Australorp pullet, one of nine. Her sisters, Agnes, Rockstar, Pinky-Pinky-Pinky, Skateboard and a few others are not pictured. Could you ever have guessed that I had the help of my friends' preschoolers when naming my chicks? ;)