Spring Chickens

We got some baby chicks. Now that we have a coop for chickens so close to the house - right inside the fenced backyard - and can be reasonably sure that coyotes aren’t going to get them, we thought we’d take the risk on a few more. 

There wasn’t a lot of variety available at the farm stores in town. Mostly red or black sex links, broilers, and a few heritage breeds. I was specifically looking for broody breeds,  and I was frustrated because not only are there just not that many broody breeds being produced these days, but the stores uniformly had no information about the broodiness or lack thereof in the breeds they were selling. In one store, I asked the person working “do you carry any broody breeds of chicks?” And she answered me “what does broody mean?” 

I must be getting old. 

Well for those who don’t know, like the girl working in my local farm store, a broody breed of chicken is a breed in which the hens will sit on eggs, hatch out chicks, and raise them herself. What? Don’t all chickens sit on eggs? NO. Most modern breeds of chickens have had the broodiness bred out of them. When a hen is broody, she isn’t laying. When she’s raising chicks, she isn’t laying. It’s not cost effective to raise broody chickens for egg production. All your best egg laying breeds - leghorns, Rhode Island reds, etc, will not go broody. 

We eventually found two Cochin chicks. Cochins do go broody, and they also have cute feathered cheeks and feathered feet. We also bought two Golden Comets (not broody) and two Easter Eggers (seldom broody - they are  not Americaunas, which also lay blue eggs and DO go broody). Now all six chicks are out in the converted rabbit hutch under a heat lamp, which I hope will be sufficient in this nasty, cold, wet weather. 

Speaking of colorful eggs, something very weird happened yesterday. We have five Rhode Island Red hens who have been laying all spring. They have all been laying many many eggs, and all of those eggs are, as you would expect, large and brown. Until yesterday:

There was a mystery egg in the nest box - a small blue egg. I have never, never, in all my years heard of a hen who could lay eggs of different colors. Hens who lay white eggs ALWAYS lay white eggs, and ditto brown, blue, green, and pink. Sometimes you get some weird eggs alright - teeny little ones the size of marbles, wrinkled ones. Once I even found an egg without an outer shell, just the inner membrane. That was an odd egg. But I have no explanation for this blue egg. 

Maybe we had a chicken visitor. My daughter and I had a good laugh imagining a lady chicken visitor who suddenly realized she was about to lay an egg. 

“Oh Penny, do you mind if I use your nest box?” 

“Oh of course Georgina, it’s right there on the wall. Yes, that plastic milk crate attached with zip ties. Make yourself at home.” 

“Oh thank you Penny I can’t imagine how I forgot to do this before going out….. BUCK BUCK BAGAWK!”