Friday, June 24, 2011

Fun facts about chickens

Fact #1 A hen will sometimes kick a newborn chick out of the nest if it is a different color then she is.
Fact #2 A newborn chick can fall a long ways and be ok.
Fact #3 If you pick up tough little chick, it will imprint on you and scream if you put it down...ever.
Fact #4 That cranky hen will sometimes refuse to take spoiled chick back and attack it if you try and make her.
Fact #5 Spoiled little chick chirps at such a frequency to give surrogate mom a headache...chick gets her way yet again.


So you get the drift of what my day has been like? I learned all of these facts within about an hour of finding spoiled little chick this morning. I also found out that a little dog I had been babysitting ran one of our laying hens to death last night. So I lost one and gained one this morning. Too bad the one I gained will not lay until late this fall. (If she even turns out to be a hen). I have chickens in five different places right now because no one gets long. I have my three remaining laying hens in the chicken coop. I have Twitchy and her sisters in the chick pen in the chicken coop. I have the murderous rooster in the dog run. I have the setting hen and the other 6 eggs in a dog crate in the garage. And spoiled little chick is snuggled into my sons neck and for the moment mercifully quiet.

6 comments:

  1. Wow Chicks are feisty little fellows.

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  2. Yeah it is fun.....for a while. But there are moments it's not so fun. Like 4 am when she's cheeping like crazy because she's alone and wants to sleep with someone.
    Chickens have levels to their personalities and habits that I never knew about. Even growing up with chickens and substituting a hen for a doll at one point in my childhood, I just never knew what they were capable of. I have my brain damaged chick, her body guard, the duck who thinks he's a rooster, the orphan chick, the grouchy broody hen; it goes on and on.
    Crazy birds!

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  3. I have about six broods going right now. My chickens are free range. Some hens are good mothers, and some are not. Out of every 10 chicks, about 6 reach maturity here. The rest succumb to a number of perils including crows, other hens, getting stepped on by roosters, etc. My wife has a good success rate with abandoned chicks if we can't get one of the other brood hens to accept the chick. When my daughter was a little girl, she would find the abandoned chicks and raise them in our house until they had their feathers. This was a bad idea since chicken diapers don't exist but I could never tell my daughter "no" about anything. I still can't.

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  4. this was really cute! thanks for stopping by my blog yesterday and your sweet comment! really appreciate it!

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  5. I also learned those facts about chickens when I first started raising chickens about 12 years ago with my wife. We now know a lot more about chickens and made the site http://kernschickenfarm.com to help backyard chickens owners.

    Sorry for the lose but you did have a gain so its not to at least. Anyway Happy Chicken Raising!

    ReplyDelete

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