Category: chickens

Chick season is over

On By stefrobrtsIn 2010chicks, chickens2 Comments

Chick season is officially over. My baby chicks who were incubator hatched just a couple months ago have graduated from the brooder, to the tractor, and finally to the big coop with the rest of the hens.

The batch of chicks before that (of which there are only two left – three of the six were roosters, and one hen I gave away in place of a hen I sold this spring that turned out to be a rooster) are almost all grown up.

They should start laying any time now. Aren’t they lovely? I’m going to pair the blue/buff girls together with their blue/buff brother and see what next year’s chicks look like. I’d better get busy on that incubator!

Exploring the Incubator

On By stefrobrtsIn chickensLeave a comment
I spent a bit of time poking around the incubator today
Here is the business end. You can see the long arm that goes from off center of the drum down to the electric motor.
The motor turns a big gear which tilts the drum back and forth, 45 degrees I think.
This is the main fusebox. Power comes in and is split off, one side goes to a thermostat controlling a regular electrical outlet inside the drum, the other side goes to the motor? I’m still not sure about how the timer and the mercury switch work together.

Update: Wires go from the junction block, through the left fuse and up to the timer, and from the timer to the junction box at the top of the drum. The right fuse is between the junction block and the main on/off switch. 

Two old-style fuses. They say ‘250v’ on their bases.
This box seems to be a timer of some sort.
The round knob with the black line pointing straight up goes to the ‘wafer’ which seems to be a thermostat. The guage is attached to either a thermometer or a hygrometer for measuring humidity inside the incubator.
Inside the drum you can see the ‘wafer’, and hygrometer at the top, and the electrical conduit leading to the outlet below. Notice the condition of the inside of the drum, which is made of redwood, is very good.
There are two items plugged into the outlet – a fan and a heater.
Writing on the heater indicates it’s a 120v, 150w Chromalox Strip Heater.
This tube sticking into the drum from the front is a thermometer or hygrometer, I’m not sure what the plate with the round hole below it is for.
It’s attached to this gauge on the front between the doors
The lower door has vents but they are sealed shut.
 Looking at the inside of the door, you can see how thick these doors are. The point is to keep the drum insulated so the conditions inside can be maintained precisely. I still need to poke around a bit more to figure out what everything is and what it does.
It’s a lot of work to do what a hen does naturally!
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Big Blue Roo sent packing!

On By stefrobrtsIn chickensLeave a comment

The new Blue Roo had a special gift of gab – basically he started crowing around 6am and kept it up almost non-stop for the next 6 hours or so – he literally only paused long enough to suck in a big breath between crows. I don’t know when he wore out, but it was usually after I left for work at 11! It didn’t bother Dave, but I was hearing crowing ringing in my ears for hours after he stopped! So I found a new home for him, took a bit of a loss over what I paid for him, but it was worth it to have him gone! This morning I enjoyed the peace and quiet of not hearing non-stop cock-a-doodle-doos. Ah, peace!

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The Incubator

On By stefrobrtsIn chickens4 Comments

I have been looking for an incubator. Most of the expense in the chicks I raised to sell this year was from buying the chicks, so if I could hatch the eggs from my own flock, I’d save a lot of money – though I’d have a lot more roosters to sell too. Today my friend Martha emailed me to say she saw a free incubator on CL.

Free Humidaire Incubator, drum type, good for parts, or you can use it as is. I am out of the chicken business and just want it gone.

I called him up, he said come and get it, it was even close to home. I had no idea what I was getting.

It barely fit in the van!
One one side is a motor and control boxes, and it looks like it slowly rotates the drum back and forth to move the eggs.

A couple fuses and a mercury switch
No idea what this is, but I recognize an angry nest of yellowjackets when I see them!

Inside is a fan, and above that the racks for the egg trays, which came with it, I just took them out to move it.

What a bizarre contraption! The power cord was cut, and it’s been sitting in the weather a while, but it looks pretty good. I can’t wait to play around with it and see if I can get it working again.

A new Roo in charge

On By stefrobrtsIn 2010chicks, chickens, navi1 Comment

Two weeks ago I put my big blue roo up on CL to see if I could find him another home. I was going to replace him with one of my young blue/buff roosters that was coming along. I found a home for him a couple blocks away, so he is happily bossing around a new group of hens. He was such a handsome boy, I knew I could find him a home where he wouldn’t end up on a plate.

After looking over my blue/buff chicks again, I wasn’t sure about the cochin part of my project. Cochins are beautiful, but the feathered feet aren’t great here in the NW, because they are muddy most of the time, then they are jumping on the hens with these big muddy mops, and the hens get filthy, and it’s kind of a mess. So I decided I would wait and raise one more year of blue mix chicks, but this time with a blue orpington. I managed to find one in Sandy, Oregon, and a friend happened to be going over there for something else, so she picked him up for me.

 What a lovely boy!
He has striking black eyes, and lovely scalloping on his feathers.
So Thursday, when I gathered up all my extra boys and took them to auction, I let him out with the hens. They seemed instantly at ease, and relaxed. All the extra roosters were annoying them. The whole flock just seems at peace now. And the new roo is cock-a-doodle-dooing up a storm. Happy chickens.
The girls are just finishing up molting, and looking pretty good. Poor Beautiful had a completely bare back, and now it’s covered in pinfeathers – that’s new feathers coming in. She’s my oldest hen. 
My blue/buff girls were camera-shy this morning
Navi is fascinated by the McNuggets in the brooder box. 
I took six chicks to auction that I felt confident were boys. I kept the best looking blue/buff boy (he’s front and center in this picture), and all the girls – I hope! These kids are about ready to move out to the chicken tractor and get some grass under their feet – I’d just like them to feather up a little bit more, especially with the cool days we’ve been having. 
Getting rid of the extra chicks made a big difference in feeding them – I went from refilling their feeder twice a day to only needing to fill it every other day! I think those roos must eat twice as much as the hens!

A day at the livestock auction

On By stefrobrtsIn 2010chicks, chickens, farm4 Comments

I had accumulated quite a few extra roosters who had worn out their welcome,a nd I decided to try a different way to get rid of them. I packed them up and my friend Martha joined me for a day at Woody’s Auction in Woodland, WA – a genuine livestock/farm auction. No pictures for this post, pictures aren’t allowed at the auction.

Some poultry people I’ve talked to had mentioned the auction to me, and I figured it was worth a try. It is just outside of Woodland on Cedar Creek Road, and looks like it has been there forever. The buildings look like they could fall down on your head. We arrived and parked in the field/parking lot and wandered up to check the place out to start with. Outside appeared to be like a flea market, or a garage sale, just junk of all sorts laid out on the ground. Then we came to plants and trees, and they were actively auctioning some of that stuff off to folks sitting on plastic chairs under a vinyl carport. We continued towards the buildings where we could hear crowing.

I had been told to bring my poultry at about 10:30 and they would put them in a cage, and then hang around for the auction at noon. We walked through and looked at the chickens, ducks, geese, doves, phesants, and rabbits already awaiting auction – there were a LOT. More than I expected! When we asked about bringing mine up the guy showed us where to go, but said he was all out of cages. So my birds were left stuck in their carriers until auction time. I had my big black roo in a small cardboard box and I felt sorry for him because he couldn’t even turn around, but it couldn’t be helped. Our Lot # was 80! That tells you how many were ahead of us.

We walked around the sale barn and peered into the dark stalls at the goats, sheep and pigs. This was a small livestock auction, they do horses and cows on another day. There were some goats that looked awfully skinny, though there was a cute ewe with two little lambs at her side which was pretty tempting. The weaner pigs were cute little guys. After having a look around we went into the auction ring and had a seat on the bleachers and waited. We ran into some folks we knew, like the chicken lady from the feed store, and passed the time chatting.

Finally, it got to be time to start the auction. They started out with 20-some bags of red potatoes. Then came some bags of animal bedding, and a straw bale, then a seemingly endless supply of fresh eggs by the dozens. Finally they got to animals. I had my eye on a couple buff orpington hens, but they way they do it is that if the lot is for 4 hens, you bid on the price of one hen, then you buy all four in the lot – so it’s a ‘by the head’ price. The hens went for $12 each, which is a fair price, about what I would expect to pay on CL, except there I’d have at least a chance to find out more about them – here all I could tell is what I knew by looking at them.

Some of the animals were sickly looking, plucked, skinny, but the majority looked just fine. Most of the  poultry was young roosters, people were bringing them in to get rid of them because they were harassing their hens and eating them out of house and home – same as me. Big roosters went for about $9 – small for around $5. Roosters at the beginning of the auction went for more than ones at the end. Most went to an Asian couple who were buying most of the roosters and ducks, I’m guessing they have a restaurant. Everyone there seemed to know them.

There were probably 100 people bidding. People were buying up animals, some asked him to break up lots so they could buy just a single rabbit as a pet and they did, and the auction runner handed the kids their rabbit to sit up in the bleachers and hold.

After a long time my lots came up. The auction runner pulled my big black cochin out of the box, and held him up flapping and sqwaking for everyone to see. They bid him up to $5 or so. Then he brought up my carrier with the three young roosters and the white cochin hen who has been laying weird eggs, and he pulled them out and held them up for all to see – I think they went for $3 each. Then the last carrier had 6 of the 4 week old chicks from my incubator batch. I picked out the ones that I felt confident were roosters. No point in feeding them for another month or two if I could get someone else to take them. And someone else did, for $2.50 a chick. So my animals brought about $32, and the auction house will keep a piece of that. They said they’d send a check if I didn’t want to hang around and wait for it, and the long line of people waiting to pay told me I didn’t want to wait for it.

We left shortly after my lots were through. It was already heading for 3pm, and Martha had a dog walk to go do. We went outside and located my carriers and got the runner to put the birds in one of their cages which was empty now, so i could take my carriers home. Martha said it would be interesting to come again sometime, but to drop off the birds early, so they could be in one of their cages, then come back later to see the auction, or stay late enough for the sheep/goats/pigs next time. It was an interesting experience. I’m not sure if I’d want to do it again.

Update: I got my check 2 days later! My birds sold for $38 and change, they kept $11 for their commission, so I got about $26 back. Not bad, that will pay for 2 bags of feed. I wish I’d known how this worked before I resorted to giving away all those big roosters earlier this summer.

Plus my hens are so much happer with all those extra roosters gone, I got two eggs this morning – yay!

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Chick update plus a BAT!

On By stefrobrtsIn 2010chicks, chickens, navi, outdoors, pets3 Comments

The baby chicks are doing fine, even in the hot weather. Everyone is eating and drinking and hopping around.

So cute! Let’s hope for hens!
The main flock was enjoying some treats.
When I noticed that one of my black hens appears to be a rooster. It was the gangly look that caught my eye. That means that out of those 6 chicks, I got three roos – and I only need one.
It was hot so I let Navi have some sprinkler time
She loves it!
Some of the sprinkler was hitting the water trough, and I thought it made for a pretty picture.
Ok, you probably want to know about the bat. I saw Navi sniffing something on the ground, and then backing away like she didn’t like it. So I went to see what it was, and it was a dead bat! Eww! I picked it up and set it on the fencepost and took a picture before tossing it off into the brambles. That’s a 4×4 inch post, so you can see how tiny it is. Like a mouse with wings.
Excuse the picture of a dead critter, but I think it’s just so interesting to see one up close.
Giant ears for picking up sonar. What an interesting animal. Still, I’m glad the dogs didn’t eat it – that’s why everyone has their shots!

Introducing – Betsy!

On By stefrobrtsIn 2010chicks, chickens4 Comments

The other day I saw someone on the PDX chicken list offering up for adoption a buff cochin hen named Betsy. She said Betsy was broody, and a bit of a bully to the other pullets. I piped right up and said I wanted her! I love buff cochins, like my dearly departed Penny, and I doubt she’ll be any trouble even if she decides to try and be a bully, the rooster seems to keep all the girls in line around here.

What a pretty girl!
I decided to introduce her slowly, I let the rest of the flock out into the back field, and let her into the backyard. That way they could see each other through the gate, and I let her decide how she wanted to proceed. When it seemed like she wanted to meet them, I opened the gate.
Beautiful, my friendly old buff orpington came right over to check her out. They had a long staring contest, it lasted about 4 minutes. They stood still like a freeze frame and stared at each other. I’ve never seen hens do that before. Then they started scratching around side by side like everything was cool.
Then Big Blue came over to check her out. Having a new hen around put him in a very flappy mood!
He kept coming up to her and doing a little sideways dance, scratching and scooting around. Then he’d flap and crow some more.
In a short time everyone was scratching around together like one big happy flock 🙂

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Crazy morning!

On By stefrobrtsIn 2010chicks, barclay, chicken tractor, chickens, farm, navi, pets2 Comments

This morning was exceptionally active, and much earlier than I’d have liked! Sorry, no pictures, for obvious reasons. It started off at 5am when I was woke up by the visiting roosters. The roosters are ones that were hatched out of eggs from my flock by a neighbor in town, and of course the roosters had to get out of town when they started crowing! Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find homes for them, and you can’t have that many roosters in one place without fighting, so they are scheduled to end up in the stewpot pretty soon, as soon as I can get the guy out to butcher them. They’ve had a good life so far at least, but their ultimate destiny is to be meat. This has been a terrible year for roosters, everyone is overrun with them. This lady got 4 roosters out of 6 eggs, our splash chicks appear to be 7 roos out of 10 chicks. It would be nice if it would have skewed towards hens instead!

So at 5am I got dressed and went out and caught the four of them from the pen I had left them in last night, put them in a dog crate, and put the crate in the chicken shed. Once they were in the dark shed they went back to sleep. Unfortunately when I walked over to the shed I spotted something else out of place – my four little splash chicks had escaped the chicken tractor and were running around the back field.

I spent the next 45 minutes trying to gently coax them back into the tractor, but ultimately ended up getting the net and catching two of them that way. The other two ran off and disappeared into the blackberry thicket. That was disappointing, because I am supposed to take them over Sunday to give to a friend who has their other 6 siblings, and I would like to take her all four. So I let the dogs out to play for a bit then went in and went back to bed.

A couple hours later I got up again and went outside and found the two stray chicks hanging out by the tractor, so I got the net and managed to get one of them, but the other one disappeared into the bushes again. Since I figured she’d be hiding for a couple hours after all that drama, I let the dogs out to play and got back to my morning chores.

A bit later I was in the kitchen preparing a crock pot full of carnitas, all chicken drama forgotten, when I heard squawking and fussing outside. I ran out to find Barclay had the chick pinned, and Navi was bounding around trying to help him. I’m sure he would have eaten the chick, he just hadn’t decided where to start! I ran over, telling the dogs how good they were for catching the chicken, and scooped her up and rushed her inside. Dave pushed the dogs out of the bathroom and we set her on the counter and had a look at her. Surprisingly, she seemed none the worse for wear, with just a little blood from a couple broken feathers. I put her back in the tractor and she seemed happy to see the other chicks, and when I checked on them an hour later they were all running around like they hadn’t had the adventure of their lives this morning!

After all that, I was happy to grab Barclay and go to work where it is peace and quiet!

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Navi, settling in

On By stefrobrtsIn barclay, chickens, mighty, mouse, navi2 Comments
Navi & Barclay cleaning up where the chicken tractor was

Today I moved the chicken tractors out in the field next to the garden. I did that because Navi has been running laps around the chick’s tractor, and I thought that was cruel for the chicks, because they are surprised to see her every lap around – it’s like ‘she’s gone’ immediately followed by ‘aargh, she’s back’ – over and over and over.

While moving them the little roo who looks like he was made of spare parts snuck out and ran away, and before I could catch him he found a hole to get into the big chicken area. That was bad news for him, because I couldn’t get him back in the tall grass, and the big chickens were going to kick his little feathered butt, so there wasn’t anything I could do about it. So I went on about my chores, and an hour later I was out there with the dogs when suddenly I heard a commotion and here’s that little rooster back out of the chicken yard, and racing across the backyard with three dogs after him! I caught up just as Barclay and Navi pinned him and picked him up and snuggled him high against my chest – high, because Navi will jump high, springing up to snap at and try and grab him! I kept blocking her with my leg until she gave up and sat, but she could barely control herself. I finally was able to walk him to the tractor and reunite him with his flock.

She is still getting the hang of the cats as well. Sometimes she pounces on them and chases them if they run, sometimes the other two start it. I’m keeping a close eye on all of them.

She’s quite athletic, and can jump up on the crates. I put a piece of plywood on top of her big crate so I can put her food up there when the crate is open and she can jump up there and eat.

She’s an absolute doll! What a cutie 🙂 Yesterday she had a vet visit and the vet gave her a vaccination that upset her stomach all night. Poor pup puked and puked, and then collapsed on our bed. She was so pitiful we let her sleep there all night instead of in her crate. This morning she was feeling much better.

It’s taking some getting used to for everyone. Barclay is being such a good boy. He’s really tired from all the playing, and I’ve been trying to give him special attention as well. I felt like Barclay and I had a special one-on-one relationship before Navi showed up, and I’d like to keep that as much as possible. She’s got so much training to work on, it’s easy to forget there’s still more work to do with Barclay too. I don’t want his training to stall just because I have a new student who needs more work!

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