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I have chickens! I spent most of my growing up years in a suburb of Washington, D.C. My neighbors in Silver Spring, Maryland didn’t have chickens. Chickens were something you saw in a children’s book or on Green Acres. Real people didn’t have chickens. I write romance novels. Some people think that’s exciting. (It’s not, trust me.) Exciting? Now that’s chickens.
And there’s nothing more exciting than the moment of new life, over and over.
I have chickens!
I had 16 working on the chicken house yesterday. We’re going to need a chicken house soon! Because I have chickens!
As of the time I set this post, we have seven babies with what appears to be four others working to come out. If more will hatch, it will be today, I think, and no later. I’m not feeling very good about my hatch rate. Out of the first dozen, I lost all but Lucky. I brought home 30 more for the second batch. I’m not sure what I did wrong to not get more out of the second batch, but I’m grateful for the ones I got, and maybe there will be more today than I think?
Here’s our little banty (the yellow one) and the seventh baby, which hatched near the same time.
Left, the family photo (Princess wants to name the others after countries around the world) of the first five–Lucky and his royal court. (Is he adorable or what?)
If you’d like to come back, I’ll update this post throughout the day with the latest results. Thank you for sharing the chicken joy with me! (I have chickens!)
Update 9:15 am. My first little banty baby all fluffed up!
Size comparison of the banty baby and a standard chicken hatched around the same time. Bantams are miniature chickens, one-quarter to one-fifth the size of standard chickens when full-grown.
Today is Day 24. I’ve got SEVEN more eggs cracking now! Two more are banties–the little white eggs. One is a green egg–an Araucana (the chickens that make the “Easter” egg blue and green eggs) and the others are large brown and white eggs.
My little flock is about to double, oh my! (My hatch rate is starting to look better.)
Update: 1 pm.
More new babies! The dark one is the Aracauna! More are coming…..
My little flock is up to 10.
Update: 3 pm.
Second little banty, and eleventh chick, to join our flock! (Is it just me or does this little guy look angry?!)
Update: 9:10 pm. Our twelfth baby is here!
See yesterday’s Hatch Day, too!
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Your chicks are beautiful too. We have discovered that if we let a hen sit on and hatch eggs, that they have consistantly hatched at 20 days. We bought an incubator but have not used it yet, so don’t know how to help with your hatch rate. A good resource for all things ‘chicken’ is a magazine called Backyard Poultry. We love it.
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I told my kids the story about how Lucky almost ended up in the back 40, they loved it. Such a good story,tragedy,suspense, and a really happy ending.
anna
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Great family photo!
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Are these we’ll-have-fresh-eggs chickens or are these we’ll-have-chicken-dinner chickens? Or both?
-Kim
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Farm Girl, if we ever need/want more chickens, now that I have my own little flock to start with, I’ll let a hen sit to get more. I think nature’s way of hatching babies is better than the incubator!
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BW
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Funny that you grew up in Silver Spring…I used to live in Wheaton. My neighbor Mr Kovacs used to (Illegally) keep chickens in his backyard. We called them the syndicate and I loved them. Every once in a while they would escape to my backyard and we would all run around and catch them. One summers day the syndicate busted out and we had a huge thunderstorm. We had been trying to catch them but the thunder really scared them…all I had to do was open the kitchen door and they all came in. I had seventeen chickens roaming around my kitchen!
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I want to hug them and squeeze them and call them George. :mrgreen:
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I think getting 7 for your first try ever is just fantastic and don’t worry about the other ones. Sometimes there are chickens in there and something just went wrong and they wouldn’t hatch….so just be happy with your success. Did you ever think you would be so attached to a chicken?? hahaha…I am so jealous!!!!
Tresha in Oklahoma!!!
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YAY! Chickens are so much fun!!! We had a bunch when I was growing up. And even though I chased them and got in trouble for it, they were fun!
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I think you’ll need to feature egg recipes, Suzanne, like soufflés, omelets, custards, and so on. :smile:
-Kim
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Don’t you want to just help them out of their eggs as soon as you see it cracking?(you’re not supposed to help, right?)
I could hardly wait to get the computer on this morning to read your updates. Go Gooooo chickens!! :elephant:
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This is amazing! Thanks for sharing this. I like Princess’s idea of naming the other chickens after countries.
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Your hatch rate isn’t bad. Remember you got farm eggs–the rooster may not have been doing his duty as well as he should have, so some of the eggs may not have been fertilized. I doubt you did anything to adversely affect how many hatch from the second batch.
Chickens usually start laying around 5-6 months of age. I’m expecting my first eggs in August. Remember that hens need 14 hours of light to lay; you will need a light in the coop to encourage them to lay in winter. And most breeds take time off to moult (grow new feathers). They’ll walk around looking extremely weird for a few weeks! Leghorns and some of the hybrid varieties lay year-round without a break, so it’s nice to have a few of them for a steady egg supply while the older breeds take vacation time!
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How long does it take from when they come out to when they start looking “fluffy”?
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What will you do with them? Raise them and get them to lay eggs? What about your cat(s)? Are the chicks safe? :cattail:
We’re back to cold weather after about a week of up to 77F temperatures. But then, that was expected even after the ultra-heavy snowfall this winter. We’ve definitely had snow on Mother’s Day and even in July. I think we were saying the other day that the only month we probably haven’t had any snow ever is August.
Hope you have even more little chickies over the rest of the day.
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I had a boyfriend that raised baby chicks and would put them under a lamp..and in a pen. (about all I remember LOL). Another boyfriend gave me baby chicks for Easter, and each one was dyed – pink, green, blue…and he had them in a little pen behind his house, but a fox or something got in and ate them!!!! The next am, all I saw were little pink and green and purple feathers..so sad.
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~A
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Terry in NE OKLA
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