Meet the Flock Roundup - May & June 2018

The latest bit of paraphernalia that I've added to the coop to keep the girls entertained is a small mirror. Here Moe the Faverolles takes a quick look to make sure her feathers are all attractively in place.

Meet the Flock - September & October 2017

Marissa the Cream Legbar sez “Braaaaak! Don’t take that shot! If you hold the camera that close I’ll look RIDICULOUS!”

Here’s a nice shot of Paulette and Marissa the Cream Legbar hens from about a year ago – they were just starting to lay eggs!

Paulette could be the world’s most molty chicken in this shot! She only has two tail feathers left, but she’s really, really proud of them!

Betty the Transgender Chicken – What Happened Next

Randy's Chicken Blog has moved to a new platform. You can find this story plus all sorts of other chicken info and tales of the Hipster Hens right here!

The Life and Times of Betty the Transgender Chicken

Randy's Chicken Blog has moved to a new platform - you can find this story plus all sorts of other chicken info and tales of the Hipster Hens right here!

Meet the Flock Roundup – July 2017

Suddenly, after celebrating her one-month birthday, Paula the Salmon Faverolles chick is starting to look like a teenage chicken. Look at the feathers sprouting all over her legs & her pretty salmon colored wing feathers!

Squawky the Speckled Sussex chick looks longingly out the window at the great wide world. A week after this shot, the chicks had their first opportunity to go outside!

Meet the Flock Roundup – May & June, 2017

Meet Veronica the Easter Egger, a prolific layer of green eggs. Veronica's in her 5th year and was the only Easter Egger of her generation to lay continuously through this past winter. Such a hard worker! And very pretty to boot!

Meet the Flock Roundup - March & April, 2017

Meet Sam! Sammy joined the flock with a bunch of other chicks of a variety of breeds in 2013. Sam was a mystery chick at first - she didn't fit the pattern for any of the breeds and I was totally kerflummoxed as far as what she might be. I should have followed the rule of thumb, that if you don't know what a hen is, she's probably an Easter Egger - since they're not a true breed (they're a cross of any number of breeds with Auracanas/Americanas). Sure enough, when Sam started growing her distinctive (and highly attractive, I might add) ear tufts, I knew for a fact that she was an Easter Egger girl. Later, when she started laying those green eggs, that confirmed it!

Here's another picture of Sam. This is a picture from 2013, right after her first adult molt. Chickens can sometimes show subtle variations in feather patterns from one molt to the next and after this molt Sam had a delicate "necklace" of light gray feather. She lost this attractive feature after her next molt and it's never shown up again!

Eggshells in a Nutshell: Blue and Green Eggs

What's Up With Blue and Green Eggs?

• Blue eggs are blue because of biliverdin-IX, a pigment that’s produced in cells lining a hen’s oviduct.
• Biliverdin-IX, like protoporphyrin-IX, the pigment in brown eggs, is made from an iron-containing chemical called heme that comes from broken-down red blood cells.
• Biliverdin-IX is added to the hard testa layer of the egg shell during egg formation, so a blue egg is blue all the way through and is blue on the inside of the shell.
• Chickens that lay green eggs incorporate both blue biliverdin-IX and brown protoporphyrin-IX into their eggshells.  Since most or all of the brown pigment is in the bloom, the inside of a green eggshell is blue.
• The hue of green eggs will vary depending on how much brown pigment is present—they can run the gradient from light blue-green to a dark olive.
• While blue eggs are not uncommon in birds (think of robin’s eggs), they are a little unusual in chickens.  All of the chicken breeds that lay blue eggs originated in or contain breeding stock from South America.

Learn about white eggs here!

Learn about brown eggs here!

Blue egg courtesy of Veronica the Easter Egger

A few of the blue/green egg-laying Hipster Hens

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“I’m Molting. Mooollllting!!!”

The biggest topic of conversation amongst the Hipster Hens these days is the fall molt.  As summer wanes, the shortening days are a signal to chickens everywhere that it is time to drop their feathers and grow new ones that will help them get through the upcoming cold winter.  Each chicken has thousands of feathers, and each one will drop so it can be replaced.  Needless to say, the coop is taking on the appearance of the aftermath of a pillow fight gone really wrong.  And then there are all those hens wandering around looking embarrassingly disheveled.  Not all hens start molting at the same time, nor do they all molt at the same rate, but many of them have bare patches of skin right now and others look like porcupines as the pin feathers that will eventually grow into real feathers emerge from their skin. 

Feathers in the Dust Bath:  The hens can "wash" off a lot of feathers while dust bathing

The rule of thumb is that the ugliest hens at molting time are the best egg-laying hens.  Egg and feathers are both mostly composed of protein, so a hen needs lots of protein to produce both, and if she’s making a lot of feathers, it would be really hard to make eggs at the same time.  So egg production falls off dramatically during the molt.  The good layers drop a lot of feathers all at once and get their molt over with in a couple of months, while the poor egg layers molt more gradually—they can take as long as six months.  They eventually resume laying eggs when they’re completely satisfied that each feather is in place and their plumage is impeccably perfect.  So all those pretty hens with the sleek and glossy feathers are generally real slackers in the egg-laying department. 

Veronica Molts: Veronica, my most heavy-hitting green egg layer, sprouts pin feathers in a patch that was bare skin just a few days ago.

The egg count yesterday was seven, by the way.  Seven eggs for the entire flock!  And four of them came from the four Legbar pullets.  The Legbars won’t molt and should keep their production up through the entire winter.  Why?  Well, these girls are just six months old.  They’ve already gone through several “juvenile molts” in the first six months of their lives and are good to go with the feathers they’ve got until they’re 18 months old a year from now. Then they’ll have their first adult molt along with all the other hens.  And because they’re young and vigorous, I should be getting an egg almost every day from each of them until then. 

Paulette, Nicky, and Marissa:  No molt for the Legbar pullets!

While it is unusual, hens sometimes go through molts at times of the year other than fall.  For instance, I reported on Angitou molting in May and Arlene molting in July.  Chickens that molt mid-year may or may not molt again in the fall—it depends on the extent of their molt, when it occurred and a whole slew of other variables.  So far, Arlene is still laying and shows no sign of molting.  Angitou, on the other hand, is not laying and is beginning to look a little like a porcupine.  Mid-year molts are often stress-related and as I mentioned in my first post in my series on cruel hen cages, the commercial egg industry use this circumstance to force hens to molt.  All the hens in a flock don’t start their molt at the same time, and the egg industry finds this imprecision annoying.  So hens in many commercial flocks are stressed by manipulating the light, by withholding water, and by starving them.  This practice is not legal in many countries and the Egg Bill that was before Congress in 2012 and 2013 that I reported on last week would have made it an illegal practice in the U.S., but that legislation did not pass.  Needless to say, the Hipster Hens don’t get that sort of treatment. 

So what do I do with my molting Hipster Hens?  Well, the poor girls need more protein to make all those feathers.  Some folks start giving their hens all sorts of high-protein food like meal worms and even cat food.  While hens love this kind of stuff, it's kind of pricey and too much over a long period of time can actually cause kidney damage, gout, and other problems.  So I just switch to a commercial feed with a higher protein content.  And I avoid handling them a lot.  All those pin feathers are sensitive.  They're called pin feathers, after all - and when a hen has a whole bunch of them sticking out of her skin, it probably feels just like you can imagine it would feel!  And other than that, I just tell the girls to be patient and that they'll get through this - and when they're done they'll be covered from head to toe with shiny new feathers!

"Meet the Flock" Roundup - July & August, 2016

Meet Snowball the Silkie Rooster. This personable little roo has an amazingly long back story for one so young and fluffy. In 2013 I picked three baby chicks out of a batch of straight run fluffy-footed chicks at a local feed store. “Straight run” means that the chicks had not been sexed, so their gender was unknown. “Fluffy-footed” means just that –these chicks would turn into chickens that would have feathers all the way down their legs and on their feet. In my inexperience, I was hoping for three Silkie hens. I’m glad I was not playing the lottery that day, since all three chicks became roosters. Two of them were not even Silkies – early on I figured out that Emile and Paul were roosters (like when they started crowing!), and that they were both bantam Cochins. Snowball was the only Silkie. Sexing baby chicks is difficult – it requires the ability to see minor variations in the baby chicks’ cloacae. It’s so difficult to sex chicks that it is considered as much art as science, and is only done by professionals. Baby Silkies display such minor cloacal differences that it’s pretty much impossible to sex them at all. So you have to wait until they’re approaching maturity before you have any idea if they’re hens or roosters. And Snowball was a late bloomer. We were well into the fall when Snowball got up one day, looked around, and crowed. Unfortunately, since Paul and Emile had declared their roosterhood weeks before Snowball got around to it, crowing was exactly the wrong thing for him to do. Every day from that point on, Snowball’s life became an exercise in escaping the wrath of the other two roosters. Even the hens became hostile to him and soon everybody was picking on him. In due course, he was afraid to leave the roost – even to eat or drink. I started putting him by the water font so he would drink under my protection and I would hold him on my lap and feed him out of my hand. That kept him alive, but his was a pretty pathetic existence. Eventually I built a small 4x4 coop just for him, complete with a sign proclaiming, “SNOWBALL’S SWINGIN’ BACHELOR PAD”. He lived there by himself for about a year. Then, in 2014 I built a second coop which became Snowball’s new home and since then I’ve gradually introduced more chickens to that coop. Today, Coop 2 is home to two Silkie hens, a golden Polish hen, a buff Orpington, and the four teenage Cream Legbars. And Snowball is lord of the manor!

Meet Betty the Easter Egger! Easter Eggers are not a true breed. Rather, they are a cross of a variety of different breeds with Auracanas, a South American breed that lays blue eggs. Auracanas lay blue eggs by adding biliverdin, a hemoglobin byproduct, to their eggshells. Easter Eggers can lay eggs that range from blue to olive green. This sweet hen used to be a regular layer of pretty light-green eggs, but has not laid an egg since last fall. At age three, she’s only middle-aged, but I suspect that Betty may have opted for early retirement!

Meet Bonnie the Cream Legbar pullet! Bonnie is one of the baby chicks I got at the end of March and is unique because she doesn’t have a tail. Poultry people refer to this condition as “rumplessness” and in addition to no tail feathers, rumpless chickens are also lacking a tailbone. There are breeds of rumpless chickens, but Legbars are not one of those breeds, so I don’t know what’s going on with Bonnie. At first I was chalking it up to the Auracana (a rumpless South American breed) genetics in Cream Legbars, but after doing some more reading I now realize that when R.C. Punnett developed the Cream Legbar in the 1930's he didn't use Auracanas per se - the blue egg and the crest genes came from a "yellow-brown colored, crested Chilean hen"—no mention of the hen not having a tail. I’ve exchanged emails with the breeder that Bonnie came from and she is surprised – this has never occurred in her chickens before. I suppose that this must be a spontaneous mutation, which makes Bonnie very special. I expect once she’s a little older she’ll develop super powers.

Here's another picture of Bonnie enjoying a little leaf tidbit in the chicken run.

Meet Buffy the Buff Orpington hen. Buffy is in her fourth year, but maintains her girlish figure and turns out a continuous stream of those lovely brown eggs. She does stop laying eggs on occasion and goes broody. She actually is the only non-Silkie hen in my flock that has bouts of broodiness. I'm hatching a plan (no pun intended, of course!) to put her broodiness to good purpose by using her as the broody hen for next year’s batch of chicks.

Meet Carmen Maranda the cuckoo Marans and Mary the golden Campine. This is not a fabulous picture of either hen, but it’s a great juxtaposition of the largest and smallest hens in the big coop. Carmen, as mild mannered as she is large, lays beautiful chocolate brown eggs and Mary, high-energy and aloof, lays petite white eggs.

Meet Charlie Barred Rock. Charlie is in her fourth year, and just between us, is kind of bossy and verbose. She never stops talking! How can any hen have so much to say? Charlie is the largest of the Barred Rocks and she is without a doubt the alpha hen in the flock, so maybe all that talk is just her reminding the other hens how cool she is.

Meet Courtney the white Silkie hen. If you’ve followed this blog for any time you may feel Courtney needs no introduction, since you no doubt followed the story of Courtney raising the batch of Cream Legbar chicks as their surrogate mom. But Courtney actually has a secret past! Courtney started life in an amazing local bookstore that is not only filled with tons of children’s books, but also a variety of animals for the kids to interact with. Courtney was known as Iggy Peck back then—a perfect name for a chicken living in a bookstore! While Courtney is the smallest chicken in my flock, she makes up for her size with her assertiveness, and apparently that part of her personality manifested itself in her previous life as well. She not only made life miserable for the other chicken in the store, a poor hen-pecked little rooster named Neal, but one fateful day she also pecked a toddler. It was a soft peck and the toddler was not harmed, but Courtney lost her job selling books that day. So then she came to live here at the ranch. The bookstore folks report that since “Iggy Peck” left, Neal has blossomed into a happy, outgoing rooster that loves the attention that all of the kids bestow on him. And Courtney has become a Hipster Hen and a mom! So this is a story with happy ending for everybody!

Coop Update

Here are Nicky and Paulette, half of the Legbar teen foursome, chillin' and hangin'. The teenage Legbars are seven weeks old this week, and like all teenagers they hang out.  Since they don't have a mall to hang out in, they've decided that the happening place to be is the nest boxes.  This is unfortunate, because, like all teenagers, they're not very tidy.  The adult hens know that nest boxes are for nesting and keep them clean.  Since the Legbar teens think they're for hanging out, they use them for their own personal toilet space - much to the consternation of the adult hens and me.  Maybe I need to post a "no loitering" sign.

In an earlier post, I talked about how I was planting oats in the chicken run.  Well, the oats are growing well and today the chickens are out in the run enjoying them.  It's a seventy-degree afternoon with a slight breeze and lots of sunshine dappled by the shade of the oak trees.  Think the chickens are happy?

Another shot of some of the chickens enjoying the oats in the chicken run.  That's Sam the Easter Egger in the front, then going around clockwise, we've got Rhoda and Roxie, two of the Rhode Island Reds, then Paul the frizzled bantam Cochin roo, Jennifer the Polish hen, and finally Buffy the Buff Orpington.  With all that green stuff in their diet, I expect lots of eggs with dark orange yolks, choc full of omega-3's. 

Coop Update

Happy birthday to the chicks on their one-month birthday!  Here are Mama Courtney, Bonnie (in back), Marissa, Nicky,  & Paulette (L to R).

Here's a picture of Nicky the Teenage Chicky.  See how she's starting to get the crazy Legbar hairdo already! She's also already getting the salmon colored breast feathers that will be her adult color.

Meanwhile, over in the big coop, every nest box in the coop is empty except for this one which both Veronica the Easter Egger & Buffy the Buff Orpington seem to feel is the only one that will work for them. Never said chickens were bright. On the other hand they're a lot like us.

First Green Egg!

Today's coop surprise was the first green egg!  I'm not completely sure, but I think the credit goes to Betty the Easter Egger.

The Chicks Are Two Weeks Old

This is a group shot of pretty much the whole gang - as they get older you can start to tell that this is a pretty diverse collection of breeds.

Angie and Jennifer, the White Crested Black Polish Hens are already starting to get crazy hairdos.

I threw together a haphazard "training roost" and the kids started checking it out right away - they get onto the roost more by hopping than by flying, but there is definite wing action going on!  Here's Rhoda the Rhode Island Red checking it out.

This is Sam, one my pretty little Easter Eggers

Veronica the Easter Egger is starting to look all grown up with those tail feathers.

Chick Pix!

Here are a few pictures of the babies.  Some, but not all of them have acquired names.  I knew from the get-go that the three little fluffy-foot chicks would be named after those co-workers who were so insistent that I get Silkies.  A few more have been named after other co-workers who seemed to badly want in on the chicken name thing.  Others have been named for a random variety of reasons.  One of the little Easter Eggers has a "V" on her head, so she needed a name starting with that letter - she's now Veronica.  Another Easter Egger who looks a lot like Veronica except without the "V" obviously had to be Betty.  And I am sad to report that I named one of my Buff Orpingtons "Buffy."  Yeah, I know.  I'll bet nobody's ever done that before.  The other Buff Orpington then became Willow by default.  None of the Barred Rocks or Rhode Island Reds have names yet - it is hard to tell them apart - and maybe I need to get a handle on their personalities before I come up with names!

Veronica the Easter Egger

Courtney the Silkie Chick

Paulette - a fluffy footed chick of unknown heritage, not a Silkie

Mary the Campine - The daughter of a co-worker was in love with one of my two little Campines and asked me to name it for her.  I told her, "But there are two and they're identical!  How can I tell Mary from the other one?" She responded, "Name them both Mary!"  So that's what I've done.  The Campines are Mary and Mary.

Angie the Polish

Two Rhode Island Red chicks that thus far have no names - Look at how fast their little wings are feathering out!