It’s Tuesday! That’s picture day in the coop… or birthday picture day! Dani, Eugenie and the Easter Egger baby were all born on Tuesdays.
Dani and Eugenie are 9 weeks old today.
While I usually find them together – Claire taught them well, didn’t she? – I have noticed Dani sneaking into the coop with the pullets. He tries to eat with them, and they chase him away. Ah, young crushes!
After he gets chased away, he finds his sister and resumes his duties of watching over her.
They are not much difference in size, honestly, and now about ¾ the size of the March pullets. (Well, some of them. The Orpingtons and the Australorps are HUGE!)
At night, they snuggle in together just below the roosts. Sometimes, Eugenie likes to sleep on the roost with her papa, but Dots is not as receptive to Dani and will chase him. So usually Eugenie will also leave the roost to stay with him.
I worry what will happen to Eugenie when the time comes to decide Dani’s fate. If he is culled, will she become a loner like Pip? Or will Big Brother take her under his wing? Or will she start hanging out with Abby’s babies?
Speaking of Abby’s babies…
This is what week 3 looks like. 🙂
The two Sulmtalers like to chest butt each other and Choc Orp #1 (top left in the college) has a big comb and little red wattles. Yes, I have a minimum of 3 little roosters in this batch. I have no clue how to gauge little Pavel, the Pavlovskaya or the Easter Egger, as all of these are breeds I am unfamiliar with. EE (or Esther, as Little Dude calls him/her) is my biggest chick, with long dark wings and all that orange in the chest and shoulders. So beautiful! Hopefully a little hen I can keep.
Aren’t they adorable?
And lastly… my first ‘Baby Boy.’ Pip. The no-longer Cute and Fluffy… but the Handsome and Funny.
I took these pictures this morning. Pip lead his ladies to the back gate and realized I hadn’t taken a picture of him recently. He really is a beautiful little Pipsqueak. 🙂
Well, last week was an extremely busy one, and not all of it was.
My aunt and uncle came to visit from Florida. It was nice seeing them, but we were trying cram as much stuff into one visit as we could and it didn’t work out well. Especially not with My Girl starting her first real job (as a hostess at a restaurant) and Little Dude having 4-H meetings and birthday parties. So what honestly ended up happening was my Dad took his sister and her husband places and I ran my kids to their places and it was just wound up a crazy exhausting week. For everyone.
In the middle of this, my former sister-in-law’s mother die. It was sudden and not expected and my ex-sil was devastated, not to mention my niece and nephew. Saturday was the funeral. We all (mom, dad, my aunt and uncle, me, My Girl, and a fiend of my niece’s) pitched in to set up and run the after-funeral memorial luncheon. It’s what families do.
Yesterday was DH’s 40th birthday. We did a ‘cowboy’ theme, wore bandanas and cowboy hats. It was simple, but great.
In the chicken world, we’re up to about 12-17 eggs a day now. More of the younger girls are laying and the older ones are moving more fulling into molting. Yay, fun!
Dani and Eugenie are 8 weeks old today.
8 weeks old!
Dani, Eugenie, and their Momma
They don’t often hang out with their mother any more, but today when I was getting pictures of them, I did manage to catch a rare pic of the three of them by the waterer. Mostly, they do their own thing now, which largely entails avoiding upsetting the older girls and hanging out together.
Sometimes, I find them both in the bushes with their big brother Pip. I don’t know if they’re starting a club for former “Littles” or what but he tolerates them pretty well and doesn’t mind if they hang with him and his ladies.
Yes, Pip is getting his own ladies. About 5 or 6 from what I can tell, who prefer him to Dots. Yay, Pip! 🙂 His voice is also deepening. He is growing up.
Pip also likes to help his mother with her new babies. They are two weeks old now and I’ve seen Pip watching over them and teaching them how to scratch.
Abby’s Littles, 2 weeks old
Well, here they all are…Abby’s littles one, at 2 weeks. These are the ones who’ve survived so much just to get here. Starting on the top row, we have Choc Orp #2, Choc Orp #1, Baby Sulmtaler #2, (row 2) Pavel, Esther, and Baby Sulmtaler #1. # indicates birth order. Esther is the oldest.
Esther, the Easter Egger baby
Little Dude says Esther is the easter egger’s name. Regardless if it’s a boy or girl. I’m hoping little girl, because I can’t keep them if they are boys. I’m only allowed 2 roosters. Dh’s edict.
But look at ‘Esther’s’ wings! They are longer and more filled out than the rest of his/her siblings.
I’m beginning to see where some of what Abby did with Pip last winter was not just a winter thing, but how she is going to raise all her chicks. She kept them all indoors for about a week (with the exception of the little choc orp who somehow got outside and stayed outdoors overnight). Then she started encouraging them to come out. The first handful of days, she couldn’t get them all to go back up the ramp after they’d come down it, so she would up sleeping on the steps at night with them until Little Dude and I came to lock up and then we would scoop her and her babies up and put them in the coop.
Sunday,she managed to take them in on her own before we got there. 🙂
Unlike Claire, who encouraged independence and exploration, Abby keeps her six remaining chicks close to her, secured in the weeds around the steps and in the run. They don’t go much further than that, but she teaches them how to find things to eat by digging in the dirt and how to find shelter and shade in the weeds and tall grass.
No fence climbing or forays to the pond like Claire allowed Dani and Eugenie.
It’s amazing how different their mother styles are.
In all the upheaval of babies hatching, babies dying, my aunt and uncle coming to visit and Little Dude’s 4-H projects, I forgot to post Dani and Eugenie’s Week-aversary post. Now, here it is time for another one!
Dani and Eugenie, week 6Week 6, standing next to a 19-week old Australorp. The Australorps are getting HUGE, btw!Week 7.
Dani and Eugenie are now mostly on their own. I catch them hanging out sometimes with their momma, sometimes with big brother Pip, and sometimes with their papa Dots.
Last week, they even stayed inside the coop to ‘help’ auntie Abby teach the new wee ones how to scratch in the wood shavings. From a respectable distance, of course!
The rest of the flock seems to have no real problems with them. They share time at the water dish and while they still don’t get first dibs at the treat dish anymore, they aren’t being ostracized for trying, either.
Usually I find them snuggled together at night, although sometimes Dani likes to perch in the rafters above everyone and Eugenie would rather perch near one of the adult roosters at night. Sometimes Pip, but mostly Dots, so I often see them both sleeping with their papa.
The rest of the flock does not shun or push them away, like they did with Pip. I think that because they already ‘did this’ with Pip as a baby, they know what to expect and don’t care as much that there are little ones running around with them.
a Mystery Bin Girl, age 20 weeks
Our spring time pullets are all going to be 20 weeks this week. This means they are reached their sexual maturity. I am not sure how many of them are laying, but we’re currently getting between 12-14 eggs a day. Some of them are quite small, while others are clearly the work of the older girls. Once again, I wish for a video camera to see who is coming and going from the nests.
Does anyone remember that movie? Just me? Okay, well, then…
Today marks Dani and Eugenie’s 5th week-aversary.
Claire’s Happy Little Family, week 5 🙂
Aren’t they the sweetest family, still? Claire has truly surpassed my worries about her as a mother. She is protective, yet lets her children have the space and independence to explore and learn on their own. She teaches by showing once and then doing.
She apparently has help because some of the pullets (who still apparently think Claire is the Patron Saint of Young Chickens) have taken it upon themselves to watch over the babies. As Eugenie still likes to wander off on her own sometimes and often confuses her momma with other Rhode Island Reds, I guess this is a good thing that some of the pullets have appointed themselves to watch over and give guidance. It’s sweet of them to repay Claire’s accidental protection with intentional.
It is still very hard to get pictures of both of these chicks. Eugenie takes any attention I pay them as an attempt at picking her up and she will run for it. But I did manage to get these of the happy little family.
Already at 5 weeks, most of their baby down is gone. Eugenie is still a snowball. Dani, a warm brown with white & tan feathers mixed in.
Eugenie and Dani
Dani in motion
Rare moment where Eugenie is sitting still
Siblings 🙂
A beautiful Family
Eugenie in motion
Dani and Momma
Dani. Still a boy.
I am curious about how the next few weeks will go. Dani and Eugenie, by virtue of it being summer time and not the dead of winter, have an entirely different relationship with their momma than Pip did with Abby. They wander more, explore more. There’s more to eat, do and see. They’ve already lost most of their baby fuzz and in that regard, they are ready to be free of momma. But at 5 weeks, Claire is still putting them in bed in the coop by 5pm. For all the freedom she gives them, bedtime is still very strict. I can’t tell if either of them (or both) still sleep under her. They returned to the maternity ward after their trial of the roosts. I guess they prefer the solitude of the nest there to the crowded perches. If I peek under the curtain – which I did yesterday – at least one of the chicks is sitting next to Claire, not under.
I wonder if Claire will push them away and out of the nest, return to her sisters, earlier than Abby did? It’s summer, it’s warm. They all won’t need to huddle and cuddle for body heat. Or will they just slowly drift apart over the course of the summer, as age and more independence asserts itself?
Will the babies notice so much? Or will they not care? Pip stuck close to Abby most of the winter, even to the point of sitting in the nest beside her when she began laying eggs again and “baby sitting” her egg after to make certain no one touched his potential sibling. It was hard to explain to him that momma didn’t need his help in the slightest.
It’s actually kind of hard to believe that Claire’s sweet babies are 4 weeks old, and yet, they are.
They really have integrated well with the rest of the flock.
This morning, they were up in the rooster and I was able to get decent pics of both of them. Eugenie is such a stinker and hard to get pictures of at all.
Eugenie or Eugene?
This week has seen a growth spurt in both of these chicks. Dani still looks like a little rooster with that big comb of his.
Eugenie, while still sporting little to no comb as of yet, is now grow wattles. You can see them fairly well in this picture. Comb is still tiny, though. I’m still giving ‘her’ an 80% chance of being a girl.
Dani, however, is pretty much Danny. I am loving his coloring, though.
For comparison sake, here is Pip at about the same age.
Pip, roughly age 4 weeks
Pip had the same jowly look, but definitely a bigger comb.
Okay, so here are the week-aversaries for the middle 2 weeks of June and a lotof picspam. 🙂
The “Littles” who are not so little, are 16 weeks old now.
Week 15, which was last week.
Week 16, which was this week
I’m going to have to stop calling them the Littles now because, truth to be told, the are NOT little. The Buff Orpington boys are ever bit as big as Pip and one one them is as tall as Dots. He’s a dark orange boy who thinks he’s The Boss but he’s still afraid of Dots. I laugh at him because I know he’s not the real boss. (That would still be Abby. Even Dots defers to her!)
Week 15 was a milestone for the five roosters in this bunch of brooder-mates. It is the age at which I guesstimated the boys would be old enough/big enough to head off to Freezer Camp. And also the point at which I wanted the young pullets to be integrated into the bigger flock. Originally, I’d thought to keep them all segregated until Week 15, and then integrate but, as previously mentioned, we did the integration early. It went well, and is still going well.
But no… Littles they are not. More like Mediums. Claire’s babies are the new Littles… and when Abby’s clutch happens, those will be the new Wee Ones. It’s an on-going cycle.
In the last couple of weeks, the boys in this bunch have been learning to chase the ladies, and are grabbing necks and pulling feathers, which results in lots of screaming on the part of the girls and bucking-from Dots. He does not, however, get after them and chase/reprimand them for it the way he does when Pip tries to make moves with the older hens. In short, I don’t think Dots considers them ‘his’ the way he does the older hens. He lets the 5 Brooder Boys get away with their antics, as long as they don’t go near the older ones.
This morning, I observed two of them trying to grab the same hen by the neck at the same time. The brutes.
It’s time. Freezer Camp registration has been scheduled for this Saturday, with five openings.
I’ve been debating sending Pip to camp instead of one of the Brooder Boys. He’s so shy and such a loner, and I’m very afraid he won’t mingle with the girls even after the other boys are gone. His being an only child really has hindered him in some aspects.
However, he’s also our First Farm Baby and very handsome. I rather like his looks very much. So, we’ll be keeping him, but I’m going to be watching him once the other Boys go. If he doesn’t open up to the pullets before Dots snags them up by the time Abby’s new children are hatched and grown, we may still be looking at that option. I’d hate to do it, but keeping one of the others would at least mean new genetics. Pip is Dot’s son, so right now, any babies would all be related. 😦
And now… to lighten the mood from all this talk of Freezer Camp… here’s some pics of the Brooder Bunch from the last couple of weeks. They have really been enjoying the Pasture a lot.
This week was Week 3 for Claire’s Littles.
Claire, Dani (Danny) and Eugenie.
It’s really hard to get pictures of them because Dani and Eugenie are always in motion and they spend so much time in the shade trees with the bigger chickens.
But here they are at Week 3.
I am still very amazed that Eugenie is so white. It flies in the face of everything I thought about the sexlinks and their off-spring and Rhode Island Reds and their off-spring. Genetics makes for an interesting study, don’t you think?
Here are two chicks, whose mothers are both Rhode Island Reds (or the same mother, because Claire laid 2 of the 3 eggs that hatched, so 2 of the three original chicks were hers)… and one of them is redder than red … and the other is as white as a snowball.
I’m making gender guesses now, btw. Dani, I am pretty certain, is actually Danny. He has a way bigger comb and I can see places where the nubs of spurs are going to be. Eugenie, on the other hand, has an almost non-existent comb. I’m giving her fair odds on being a little girl.
Anyone else care to make early guesses are welcome to do so. We did so well guessing the other bunch of Littles. 🙂
That’s it for this week’s birthdays! This is about the time I stopped doing Week-aversaries for Pip, so it will likely be the last day for this batch of young ones, too.
Well, it’s Week 2 with Claire’s Wee Ones, and I thought, since her babies are technically the 5 round of babies I’ve raised here on the farm, I’d do some comparing. So here’s EVERYONE at the age of Two Weeks.
Golden Comets (gold sexlinks), age 2 weeksRhode Island Reds, age 2 weeks
Dani and Eugenie’s momma is an RiR. Their papa is one of the Comets.
Pip, Week 2. Pip is Dani & Eugenie’s older half-brother.The ‘Mystery Bin Girls’ – no relation to Claire’s wee ones, but we think they are some kind of sexlink as well. So… potentially same breed as papa? Or simialr breeding?The Australorps. No relation, but cute as heck!
And
The Buff Orpingtons.
And finally…
Dani and Eugenie aka The Wee Ones
I’m looking for similarities. Dani looks an aweful lot like the RiRs at this age. Eugenie is more white like the Comet boys (despite the fact that Eugenie has a smaller, almost non-existent comb and that screams “hen”). Neither of them looks much like Pip, despite sharing a father and their mothers all being RiR.
There is, I suppose, a slight possibility that Pip might actually be the papa to one or both of them. that would make whichever one 3/4 RiR (Dani?) … BUT… Pip has (I’ve mentioned before) had a tough time mating with the hens because they all have found him incredibly annoying. I know of three hens he’s successfully mated with. The rest, he either got beaten and chased by the hen in question or Dots chased him away.
I don’t really think Pip is the papa. But that’s a story for another day.
With the sadness of losing little Stevie, I didn’t feel like doing the week-aversary posts.
Here they are:
the “Littles” are getting a lot less little
The spring “Littles” are spending their week 14 learning to explore a little bit more of the great outdoors.
The older ones seem to have really accepted them well.
Some of the Buff Orpington roosters are as tall as Pip and Dots now.
Claire and her babies continue to be a buffer between them and the older ones. I think they consider her a ‘patron saint’ or something.
Here are the first week-aversary pictures of Claire’s wee ones. It’s mostly Dani, because Eugenie wouldn’t let me hold her/him long enough to take a picture.
Time flies when you’re having fun! Or consistently busy… or a little bit of both!
The Obligatory Week-aversary pic
They’ve gotten so big, haven’t they? They’re back to looking like feathered sardines and I’m currently wondering how long I should actually wait to let them try integrating with the rest of the flock. There are so many variables to consider right now, not the least of which is Claire and her babies. I should wait long enough for them to be ‘established’ as a fixture in the flock before I try adding new players to the game.
I love how all chicken breeds have something unique about them. My sexlinks (the golden comets) were rowdy and sweet at the same time. The little roos loved attention and the hens were shy and private.
The Rhode Island Reds were rough, wild and determined to break out of the brooder.
This years Australorps are very protective, as a breed, even the pullets.
My Buff Orpingtons, roo and pullet alike are all cuddlers. I have one little hen who will sit on my boot if I don’t acknowledge her and pick her up. And then there’s this:
The BO roos have, since day one of their life on this farm, cuddled up into little piles of fluff at night. Laying one on top of the other. They even do it in the heat.
As you can see from the above pic, this one BO boy will stretch out his extremely long neck over the other chicks in his ‘puppy pile,’ covering them completely.
I did a lot of research, and upon strong reccomendations from a trusted chicken medic, I treated similar to splay leg, dubbed the chick ‘Baby’ and brought him/her into the house with a buddy (Ash) to keep him company.
They were here a little over a week, and while Baby never got back to 100% perfect, he/she eventually made enough of a recovery to go back to the brooder.
Readers… I give you… Baby. Not a hen as my post from back in March suggested (I called Baby a ‘she’ consistently)… but young rooster.
I’ve been trying to keep tabs, and honestly, it wasn’t too long after Baby and Ash returned to the brooder that I realized Baby might be a little boy. He exhibited signs right away and after a couple of transition days, dove right into the chest-butting displays like the rest of his brothers.
He is the smallest BO rooster I have right now, of the four. Shorter, and more compact, as I hope this picture shows. The dislocated leg left its lasting mark on Baby. He stands with one leg/shoulder/whatever slightly lower than the other and sometimes loses balance on the roosts at night. As you can tell, the tail isn’t straight either. It kind of curves.
All that aside, my observances of all of them show no signs that Baby suffers. The flock does not pick on him, he is able to run and play with his brothers and sisters, eats well and is growing at a good rate. As he and his brothers are destined for Freezer Camp at the end of the month, I’m not really too worried about it.
But I am glad that he is still doing okay. He’s just… one of the guys. 🙂
The Littles are 12 weeks old now. Actually 12 1/2 by the time of this post, but I was busy this week.
Just hurry up and take the picture, Mom, so we can go outside
It seems strange to not have Black Jack here. I miss seeing Black Jack in the coop and tunnels with them. I hope he is happy in his new home.
In his absence, one of the Buff Orpington roosters has started to crow. They are are tall boys, and look bulky and brawny. But when I pick the biggest boys up, they are all legs and fluff.
Is this common to Orpingtons?
Jack had more bulk on him than all four BO roosters together!
Tweety, the wild jungle birdwatermelon! yumSaving these pieces for later – if no one finds them first!
There a Chick 