Name That Chick

From Chicken and Eggs

The kids finally settled on some names for the three new chicks. The photo above shows them dirtbathing with mother hen "Beach Bunny." The golden chick with the black stripe is a Buff Araucana mix called "Cheeto" (born second). The Araucana Black Star mix next to Cheeto is known as "Sleepy" although it's sometimes called "Little Red". The largest one (shown sitting) is a pure-bred Araucana called "Checkers." Checkers is the first-born and the most aggressive when it comes to feeding. Here's Maya mugging with Cheeto and Sleepy.

4 and 5 Didn't Thrive

Hatchlings 4 and 5 were born this morning, but sadly did not stay with us. One was found lifeless in the nest, possibly crushed or born with some sort of internal defects. The other was born with its yolk sac on the outside of its body, having failed to draw it back within itself before finally hatching (they do this so as to feed off of the nutrients for the first few days of life outside the shell). After some attempts to remedy the fatal oddity, the chick was euthanized. There are three eggs remaining and they've been moved to our incubator in the garage. If they don't hatch within the next few days, we'll probably end up burying them.

Number 3 Has Hatched

Our third chick hatched overnight! This one appears to be another Araucana. No telling the gender on these little fuzzballs until they get older. There was a fun episode of "Dirty Jobs" that featured this not-so-desirable profession of chick sexing and "venting"...

New Week, New Chick

Just hatched about an hour ago was chick number two! Family members received a phone call from an excited Maya to let them know that we have a new Buff Orpington. It also appears that a third egg is slightly cracked which may mean another hatchling on the way. Stay tuned...

The Lone Chick

Our little Araucana chick is doing fine (and remains nameless due mostly to ambiguous gender), Beach Bunny is a good mother hen, and we've been having fun feeding them crickets and grasshoppers since they are sequestered away from the rest of the flock and cannot fully free-range at this time. Still, only one of the 11-egg clutch has hatched, and we lost two eggs which we found broken. Beach Bunny continues to incubate the rest although she seems to come off her nest more often now to demonstrate scratching and bug-catching for her sole hatchling. We'll give the other eggs a few more days before removing them, but here's hoping that at least one or two more are fertile!

You Gotta Keep 'Em Separated

To prepare for the hatching of the eggs, we ("we" meaning Dionne) set up a separate enclosure within the existing chicken run---a cage within a cage, if you will. Apparently, other hens might be rough with the newborn chicks and the roosters may flat out kill them. The top level of our bucket nest structure was only held in place by its own weight which made it easy to relocate to the new enclosure, broody hen and all. Below you see the two roosters curious and desperate to get into the restricted area.

For now, our sick (but nearly recovered) hen Chewhair will share this space. In fact, when broody Beach Bunny got up to stretch her legs, Chewhair took over the incubating for a few minutes.

We also got a quick peek at the eggs to see if any were cracked or rotten.


You can see here that we marked them initially to make sure that no new eggs were added to the clutch which would make it hard to track hatchling schedules. We found out that using a regular pencil is better than a Sharpie because the eggs are indeed porous...you live and you learn.