Baby Chicks

As I said in an earlier post, we were experimenting with hatching eggs from an incubator and from brooding hens.  In our first experiment, we had six eggs under Josephine and 15 eggs in the incubator.  Well, that didn't work out too well.  Apparently, the incubator instructions were generic without taking into account the humidity (or lack of) in the West.  No eggs hatched from the incubator.  Josephine hatched three.  Janae named them Peter, Paul, and Larry.  They were about three weeks old when Larry escaped and the dogs tried to herd him back into the pen.  Chickens don't respond well to Australian Shepherds when they try to herd.  Larry is now fertilizing the garden.

Chickens also don't stand still for pictures.  Here is a picture of Peter and Paul with Atilla the Rooster and Josephine.  Peter (Petie) is the little white blob and Paul is the darker one.

Soon after the chicks hatched, we started eight eggs in the incubator, keeping careful watch on the humidity.  About a week later, Mary Ann started to go all broody so we put six eggs under her.  Three weeks later, three eggs hatched out.  Jim named them Festus, Cleophus, and Rufus (after people he knew growing up). 

 

This is Festus, right after he popped out.  Not quite the warm and fluffy surroundings that Mary Ann would have provided and not the cute fluffy chick he would be later.

 

A couple of days ago, Janae went out to check on things and found Festus dead.  We don't know what happened to him.  He is now fertilizing the garden also.  I say "him", but the truth is that we don't know the sex of any of our birds until they get older.  It seems that when we call them female names, they turn out to be male:  Atilla the Hen, Ginger, and Shaniqua I and Shaniqua II to name a few are all male.  The ducks on the other hand  (named Goose, Nigel (deceased), Elmer and Oscar) are all female.  We want more hens so most of the names are male.  We shall see.

Just before we left for Kansas City, Mary Ann's eggs started to hatch.  Three hatched.  Kristine and I were given the honor of naming these three: She named her's  Louise and Francesca and I named mine Paco.  We have come to the conclusion that Ginger is shooting blanks.  He has a gimpy leg and apparently infertility is common among gimpy-legged roosters.  It's possibly the stew pot for Ginger. We put all the incubator babies into the brooding pen with Mary Ann and her babies before we left.  When we came back, Mary Ann had adopted the older chicks as her own.  She takes good care of all five and is very protective of them.

Here's a who's who of baby chicks.  I'm sure you are interested because you wouldn't be reading my blog if you weren't (lol).  Rufus and Paco are the dark ones, Paco is smaller and younger.  Cleophus and Francesca are the reddish ones, Francesca is smaller.  And Louise is whitish.  Obviously, Francesca and Louise will be roosters.