Babies and Blizzards ;)

Again the snow flakes were falling yesterday morning but not really a blizzard...just being a drama queen about it.  But my folks are arriving here this afternoon from Southern California and I would appreciate it if the weather was at its best behavior.  That's asking a lot for this time of year in a place where summer doesn't really begin until after 4th of July.

The grand total on my hatch turned out to be 16 chicks out 17 eggs.  I opened up the egg that didn't hatch and there was a dead chick that pipped the membrane internally but never pipped the shell.  It didn't look like a pip-and-drown though because there was no visible fluid.  It's a mystery to me.  Doesn't stop me, on to my next batch of eggs: blue-laced red Wyandottes and potential olive-eggers which are a cross between Black Copper Marans and blue egg laying Easter Eggers.  Have I lost you yet?  Hopefully not!

Black Copper Maran Hatch Goes Well

 

The Black Copper Marans eggs that I set 21 days ago is almost completely hatched.  Out of the 17 eggs that made it to day 18, it seems like only one will not hatch.  We currently have 15 chicks, 1 zipper, 1 pipper and 1 silent egg.  I took it out of the incubator and tapped it while holding to my ear and didn't hear a peep.  So, he is either dead or is yet to internally pip.  I won't give up on it until late tomorrow.

I couldn't believe that the rain turned to snow this morning but only for about an hour.

Just Working Around the Farm Today

We had wonderful, rainless weather today and we worked outside almost all of it.  But before I when out to work I had to take my batch of 17 Black Copper Marans eggs out of the turner and increase the humidity since they are due to hatch on Tuesday.

Garden #2 is almost completely planted today with the exception of one part which I'm going to plant sunflowers after the danger of frost has passed.  What I did plant was carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, parsley, dill and several types of lettuce.  As you can see, we started lining the walkway surrounding the bed with newspaper and straw but I ran out of straw.  I'll get more on Monday.

On my way to the barn, I noticed that some great-horned owls babies in a nest on our neighbors place have finally grown big enough to be seen.  They are right about 20 yards from our fence line very close to where my chickens free-range.  We have seen the parents hunting rodents out in our cattle pasture and they are yet to snatch one of my birds.  I'll be keeping my fingers crossed on that one.

The "Indoor" Flock

Blue-Laced Red Wyandottes

To be honest, I really don't know exactly how many chicken we actually have here on the farm.  I know there's about 50 in our free-ranging laying flock which is housed in two chicken houses outside.  Then we have our birds housed in the barn.

Young birds

There is a lot of wasted space in the barn but we do have four nice poultry runs housing some of the birds I have separated to keep their eggs pure for hatching purposes.  Also, one run has some juvenile birds that are growing out.

Bearded Silkies

 

 

The adult birds include bearded silkies, blue-laced red Wyandottes and Belgian bearded D'uccles.  I am currently collecting eggs from all the adult pens to do one last hatch for the season.

Bearded Belgian D'Uccles

The Hatch Continues...

One chick hatched before our bed time last night.  Upon waking this morning there was still the one chick and a new pip.  As you can see in the picture, the pip is now zipping.

Now out of nine eggs we have 2 chicks and 4 pips.  What a difference three hours has made!

Pip, Pip, Hooray!

 

Today is day 20 on that batch of Black Copper Marans eggs that I had set in March.  Originally I started with 14 eggs but had to cull 5 of them because they did not develop.  I'm not certain if maybe the room I had the incubator in got too cold one night or the fertility is off, but this is the most I have ever had to cull from eggs that came from my own birds.  Kind of disappointing especially when I'm trying to fill an order for chicks.  I just set another batch of 19 eggs from the same flock in my other incubator and we will see how many of those develop.

I woke up this morning to see one pip and this is all I have right now.  Black Copper Marans eggs hatch best for me when I use a dry incubating technique for the first 18 days then 65-70% relative humidity for days 18-21.  Zero water is added to the incubator for those 18 days since these eggs do not dry down as readily as lighter-colored eggs.  I have ran lighter eggs with them when using this techinque but it does seem to dry the lighter eggs down too much and results in a lower success rate for those eggs.

The hygrometer that I use does not read lower than 20% humidity and does not even register a reading when the incubator is ran with no water in it.  I know some folks that use this technique for all types of chicken eggs that have had great results so the humidity of the surrounding environment in which the incubator sits plays a part.  But in a wood-heated house in the Northwest, the environment here does not have a lot of humidity to share this time of year.

When we get some chicks to show you all, I will post an update.

Time for Some Ham and Eggs

I'm not exactly sure why this year I have been hit with a bad case of either cabin fever or spring fever...maybe I'm afflicted with both! This was the view out my window yesterday and it just seemed beautiful and depressing all at the same time. The day before I was looking at one of our gardens thinking maybe I'll start digging it up and get ready to plant some spinach and arugula in it next week but now once again it's buried under the snow. Alas, life in North Idaho where the news of Global Warming just hasn't arrived yet.

But I am being proactive in battling this depression by defrosting a fresh ham which I will start to cure in a week. This way it should be done for Easter. I will share with you how I do it as soon as I start curing it.

Also, this evening, I am going to set 14 fertile eggs from my French Black Copper Marans flock into my trusty incubator. These eggs are from my new generation of birds that started laying late last summer. This breed of chickens lay a beautiful dark brown egg that is darkest at the beginning of their laying cycle.

So, in a little over two weeks I should have a lovely ham for Easter Sunday and in three weeks a batch of chicks. I will keep you all posted.

North Idaho Fair 2011

The North Idaho Fair comes to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho in late August. We have missed very few of them in the 15 years that we have lived here. Now that I think about, the only year we missed was the summer I had our daughter in 2002.

Before Emma came into our lives, I was very big on entering canned items every year. I even won the Ball Canning Pickling Award twice. When Emma joined 4-H four years ago, she started entering her insect collections as a Cloverbud which is a non-competitive 4-H group for kids 5 to 7 years old.

This year was Emma's first year has a full fledged 4-H kid. Her projects were Entomology and Poultry. Once we found out that we had to come twice a day for the five days of the Fair to feed her chicken and its cage, we decided to have some fun and enter some things other than her two 4-H entries. Heck, maybe even win a little cash to help cover the gas on two twenty mile plus trips we had to make daily.

Emma entered a frame of honey comb from her beehive and a dozen large eggs from our Marans flock. Both went second place which made her very happy to say the least. The judge said the comb would have placed better if it did not contain two colors of honey: light on the edges and dark in the center.

I entered 9 canned items and did really well in Salsa divisions, both green and red by getting a second place ribbon for my salsa verde and tomato salsa. My sweet pickle relish also got a second and 3 of my jam entries placed in third. I was happy :)

Now Emma's 4-H Entomology Project did really well by going Grand Champion. She was so proud and cannot wait to participate in the project again next year.
Here's Emma showing her little Belgian bearded d'uccle pullet named "Pengu". In quality judging the little bird was awarded a blue ribbon and Emma took a fourth in Junior Fitting and Handling.

We are all looking forward to attending and participating in the Fair next year. We'll probably even enter more things, too and stay in the 4-H Camper Village so we don't have to drive back and forth so much.

Thinning the Flock

Since we purchased our first incubator last year and started hatching chicks from eggs we were faced with the dilemma (if you want to call it that) of what to do with extra roosters we hatch. Do you give them away? Do you slaughter them? Do you collect them and go broke feeding them?

Well, if you give them away most likely your a giving someone a free chicken dinner. There's nothing wrong with this if you don't mind all the food and expense that went into the birds doing down the drain. Sometimes you know the person and you know they really want a rooster to be a companion (or stud!) for their hens. I gave away a cuckoo maran rooster to a family last year to live with the 20 Rhode Island Red pullets they had raised. They are still enjoying this rooster and their four kids just adore him. The rooster I gave away made a friend's life happier so it did not seem like money down the drain to me.

This week I had to cull a few spare roosters. I try putting it off because it does make me a little sad and the laying breed roosters are a little more difficult to process than the meat birds are. They are much more heavily feathered and because they are not broad-breasted like the Cornish crosses, they a have a narrow cavity which I find getting my big hands into a bit more difficult.

I've cleaned birds that I have hunted like waterfowl and wild turkeys dressing out a bird is not totally new to me. I do scald the chickens before I pluck them in 140F water for about a minute which makes them very easy to pluck.
The meat on these roosters is darker than your average meat chicken because of their maturity, more varied diet and the exercise they receive free-ranging. These birds are too tough for roasting or baking so I use them for stewing and make chicken with dumplings with them. They are way more flavorful than the average store-bought chicken.

So, even though it's a little bit of a pain to process them, I am rewarded with the wonder food they provide for us and my hens are grateful that they aren't being chased around by a bunch of roosters all day long.

The Silkie Saga

Probably "saga" is being a little too melodramatic but it was a bittersweet experience. The sweet part is that we ended up with two beautiful silkie babies from the three eggs that did develop. Bless their little pointed heads. :)

The bitter part was that my first little pipper that I blogged about in my previous post died. He zipped around the egg successfully and just stopped moving. (That's his egg in the foreground) We tapped on the incubator after a few minutes and he still did not move. I took the egg out and he was dead. Perfectly formed with no defects visible to the eye so I'm guessing he died from exhaustion going 40 hours from pip to zip.

The two other chicks hatched with no problems and are doing well. Hopefully I'll be setting more eggs very soon. Yes, it can be a bit of an emotional roller coaster but that's just how it is when you take on the challenge of raising anything: chickens, children or tomatoes they all make me want to cry at some point. ;) But the rewards far outweigh the tears!

A Pip! Now Just Waiting For the Zip.

One of our dear little silkie eggs that I blogged about last week has pipped. We came home from Emma's 4H meeting and I noticed a wee little, almost discernible crack in one of the eggs. That is what's known as a "pip".

Before we went to bed last night we were lucky enough to see the chick make the pip a bit larger while we watched. Now we are waiting on the "zip" which is when the chick pecks away the shell in a circle around the egg. The zip starts at the pip. Chicks will usually pip and rest for up to 24 hours before they start to work on the zip.

Nothing to report on the other two eggs as of yet. Hopefully this little early bird will inspire the other two to get cracking. I'll keep you all posted.:)

Reclaiming the Barn

I have taken on a huge, daunting project...converting our barn back to being a barn. Yes, from the outside it does look like a barn and it does on the inside, too. But somehow we have turned our barn into a very large storage unit and a mouse housing project.

When we first purchased our place we used the barn for what it was purchased for. We housed our two goats and a guard llama in it. I could never coax any of our steers into it though, I think because of the concrete floor but I left the big door open just in case they overcame their fear.

Then in 1999 we converted the barn to a serigraph studio and printed my husband's art work. After the arrival of our daughter in 2002 we decided to contract out to have the art prints made. We sold all the printing equipment and just started using the barn for storage mostly. I did raise meat chickens in the barn and raise chicks out there but that has been about it.

We have three sheds converted to poultry houses which has worked great for our free-ranging poultry. Now I would like to have a nice place to raise some purebred chickens like the silkies that we are hatching.

Here are some pictures of the poultry housing that we have set up already.

The barn is huge and heated, too. As you can see it needs a new roof in the worst way. We are hoping to roof it with metal this year or at least purchase the material since the bottom fell out on a lot of building materials right along with real estate prices.
I'm currently going through all the stuff right now and finding things we forgot we even had. To start we are building three poultry pens in the south end of the barn. An area we actually have kept clear of stuff. I will post some interior pictures once we have those built out. It's too embarrassing to post interior pics right now :)

Go Silkies Go!

As you all know I do enjoy our chickens. We have a mixed laying flock made up the of typical large fowl breeds you pick up at the local feed store. Also, we have a trio of Cuckoo Marans that are production stock which we hatched from shipped eggs last year.

This year we are trying something completely new for us. Emma has joined the poultry group of her 4H club. The leader has recommended that the kids show bantams because the smaller birds are easier for small hands to handle. We love silkies so it was easy to pick which bantam chicken breed we wanted to go with. But I wasn't having any luck finding some nice ones locally.

It's still a little chilly to ship chicks or young birds so I started looking for silkie hatching eggs. Of course I went hunting on the web for eggs and found Josh's Bantams, a breeder of lovely blue and splash bearded silkies. We purchased 16 silkie hatchings eggs.
Josh packaged the eggs wonderfully but one egg was cracked. No matter how carefully packaged, the postal service can be very hard on eggs. Even if eggs are not obviously cracked they can be exposed to extreme temperatures or just handled roughly.

We placed the 15 undamaged eggs into our Hovabator 1588. I candled the eggs at day 7 of the incubation. Three were developing but the other ones had nothing growing in them. All a testimony of just how rough their trip in the mail had been.
There's my three little silkie eggs in the incubator. Though I wished that the other eggs had fared better, I'm just as excited for these little guys as ever. If all continues to go well, they should hatch on 2/13. I'll keep you all posted!

Meet the Meat Chickens

Hello everybody! I know it's been a while since my last post. We have been shopping for new puppy and it seems like all my time on the computer has been dedicated to this quest. I'm not the great multi-tasker I once was and it seems like all other interests are abandoned for a short while then soon revisited and put once again in the forefront of my mind. I think I must just be getting older.

Anyways, I wanted to share with you all my first experience raising a few meat chickens. Yes, all chickens are made of meat but the bird of choice for the poultry industry and backyard farmers is the Cornish Rock Cross. They are a hybrid of the Cornish bred to the Plymouth Rock and from what I have learned so far is that parents of these crosses are specifically bred themselves to produce the desired qualities looked for in their hybrid progeny.

The purpose of these Cornish Rock birds is to grow fast...really fast. To be a nice frier/ broiler size within 6 to 8 weeks from hatching. Along with this fast growth comes the risks of their body weight growing faster than their legs can suppose them.

I really wasn't planning on getting meat birds this year but I was thinking about it. I was especially inspired by the wonderful blog The Deliberate Agrarian . It's a great place to not only learn about raising and processing chickens but also living self-reliantly in a spiritually inspired way.

My buying three meat chickens was a little of a impulse purchase though all three cost about the same as venti mocha at Starbucks. I was at the feed store the first week of June when they had their last shipment of chicks arrive. They were all pre-sold meat chicks but in one of the brooders they had 3 big one-week old meat chicks and they were available for $1.30 a piece so I bought them. I figured it was an okay deal since they had an entire week of feed and heat lamp already invested into them.

My goal for these three birds is to raise them to roaster size which is a little larger than a frier/broiler chicken. So, I'm experimenting with allowing them to grow at a slower rate by feeding them a layer food and taking it away at night. They do have interesting personalties though. Very calm and docile birds but they seem perfectly comfortable with pooping while still laying in front of their food dish! Definitely couch potatoes!
Currently I get my friers either from Costco (already processed of course!) or from my extra roosters that are a byproduct of hatching our own heavy brown egg layers. Here's one pictured above. I slaughtered a couple yesterday that were Buff Orpington crosses. These birds are young and tender but do not have the broad breast the Cornish Rock Crosses possess. I'll probably end up slaughtering some of my Cuckcoo Marans roosters, too. They are supposed to be a good table bird and they mature a lot faster than the Buff Orpington crosses.

A Hard Week to Be a Bird

I don't know if it is because of the warmer weather or what but this last week has been a tough one for the birds that we raise on our place. We do allow our birds to truly free range during daylight hours which carries its own inherent risks of course. But to lose 4 birds in a little over a week's time is a bit of a heart break.

First off we had one of our Toulouse geese just "disappear". Usually there is some feathers or something to mark the crime scene but this time there was nothing. We came up with a theory that she may have been plucked out of the pond by either a bald eagle or great-horned owl. A couple of days later out theory was disproved right before our eyes when a coyote grabbed our other Toulouse goose and spirited it away before my husband could get his hands on a gun to get a shot at the predator.

Luckily the following morning, I just happened to look out the window to see a coyote stalking some wild ducks in our pond. My husband had no problem getting the animal this time around but when he shot it, I noticed another coyote running away in the distance. Most likely a mated pair.
Not to be outdone by the goose tragedy, I lost 2 of my chickens. One shortly after the first goose disappeared. This time around there was the telltale signs of the abduction...a pile of buff-colored feathers. It was one of my younger pullets that I had hatched on my incubator test run.

A few days after the coyote was dispatched I lost one of my precious cuckcoo marans that I hatched from eggs that I had shipped from Ohio. Oh, and did I mention is was one of only three pullets that I got from my twelve eggs? This time it was the neighbor's dog who was the perp. It was strange because this dog has come here before and showed zero interest in the birds running around. But being that the marans are so young I think they made an easy, irresistable target.

Can't blame the dog or my neighbor too much. The dog was being a dog and the chicken was being an easy meal. The dog brought the chicken home and my neighbor called saying he thought his dog killed one of my birds. I appreciate his honesty, some folks would not have called us and he paid me what the birds go for on Craigs List.

What All the Well-dressed Chickens are Wearing.

From the first batch of chicks that we hatched, Emma has picked out her favorite. It's a little blonde pullet that she has named "Cooner" because she has a beard like an Ameracuna chicken. Actually she is a cross between a Buff Orpington rooster and an Easter Egger hen.

Emma has been bringing Cooner into the house and dressing her up and the chicken seems to tolerate it, too. At first I started to worry if the bird was maybe sick or something and I told Emma to stop bringing her in but after a few days I noticed nothing wrong with her. She's just a laid back chicken!

They Hatched...And I Learned Something.

Our collection of Cuckcoo Marans and homegrown mutts finished hatching today. It was a long "labor" which started with our first pip early the morning of March 23rd and ended kind of sadly this morning.

As I blogged before, we started out with 12 Cuckcoo Marans shipped from Ohio and 12 eggs from our own chickens. I did a final candling of the eggs on day 18 which gave the questionable eggs a chance to developed into something if they were in fact any good. We had 8 of our own eggs and 9 of the Marans eggs that definitely had growing, moving chicks in them.

From day 18 of the incubation to the actual end of the hatch, which is usually around day 21, the most important rule above any is: Do not open the incubator under any circumstances! Humidity plays such a critical role during incubation but even more so during the final days leading to and during the hatch. By opening the incubator during this time you can cause drastic drops in the humidity which endanger the chicks that are yet to hatch. The drier air can quickly wick the moisture out of the eggs' membrane and make them too tough for the chicks to pierce with their beaks and/or literally shrink wrap them in the membrane. Either way they will not be able to hatch and ultimately die in the egg.

Everyone has their "favorite" humidity that they like to incubate their eggs at. They arrive at this magic number through a lot of experimentation and experience. The optimal humidity for the incubator is affected by many environmental factors too such as the altitude, humidity of the house and ventilation rate of the incubator.

Our first hatch in our Hovabator 1588 was very successful and I planned on doing all of the conditions the same on this hatch, too. For days 1-17 the relative humidity was 40-50% and for days 18 to the end of the hatch the range was 60-70%. During the first hatch we had some very short-lived spikes in humidity each time a chick emerged from its egg but this was easily managed by taking the ventilation plug off the incubator for 30 minutes or so to get it back to the desired humidity range.

On this hatch I had no idea that high humidity would be a problem. We had more eggs in the incubator this time and of course more eggs means more chicks hatching. The hatch started very slowly on the 20th day of incubation with a single pip on one of the Marans eggs. This chick hatched and then another later in the evening. It was easy to manage the humidity in the desired range.
There was a point in the middle of this hatch when so many chicks hatched at once that the humidity spiked at nearly 80%. It did not worry me much because I thought low humidity during the hatch was the big danger. I opened the plug on the incubator and it took well over an hour to recover itself back down to 70%. We still had 4 eggs left to hatch 3 of which were pipped by the chicks. One still had not pipped.

The fourth to the last egg to hatch made its way cracking around the egg very slowly and seemed like it could not lift the top of the egg off. It cheeped and cheeped and seemed trapped in the egg even though it had cracked a complete circle all around it. We were perplexed..what was wrong?

I was deathly afraid of opening the incubator (remember the rule!) so we rigged this thick copper wire with a bend in the end of it and ran it through the vent hole in the lid of the incubator to help this chick out of the egg. Luckily we were able to get the egg shell off the little guy's head and scoop the chick out of the egg. The chick was unusually wet and there was about a tablespoon of fluid left in the bottom of the egg. It was also so exhausted from it's ordeal that it was just flopping around and kicking with it's eyes still shut. We thought that it must be deformed somehow. We didn't put two and two together that this chick's egg was so full fluid due to the high humidity that occurred a few hours ago. That was the last egg to hatch on day 21 of incubation.
The next morning the chick that we thought was malformed somehow was just fine walking around and hanging out with his mates. That made us scratch our heads...what was his problem and how did he recover from it? We still had three eggs left: two were pipped and still one was a "no show". The two pipped eggs started to crack and again one of the chicks got stuck in the egg even though it was cracked all the way around. I grabbed my trusty copper wire rescuer and was able to remove the top of the egg from this chick but it was still stuck in the shell. I couldn't get it out without harming it. So, we figured we had one chick that hadn't pip and one that was almost done cracking it's egg, it was worth rescuing this stuck chick. Oh, yes it was one of my Marans chicks, too!

We soaked a washcloth in very warm water, opened the incubator and laid the warm washcloth on the unhatched eggs and removed the egg with the stuck chick. It was just like the other stuck chick, very wet and exhausted to the point you thought it was sick or malformed in some way. We returned it to the incubator and it flopped around for a couple hours before it opened it's eyes and got its legs under it.

The last chick needed assistance hatching also but for just the opposite reason. It was stuck in its membrane because it instantly dried around the chick because we opened the incubator to rescue the wet chick! The wet towel was not enough to keep that egg moist. This chick was like a normal chick though. It had it's eyes open and started walking pretty shortly after hatching.

The final egg never hatched so I performed an "eggtopsy" on it and found a fully developed dead chick in it. This little guy was also a victim of the high humidity that occurred earlier. It was apparent that he had pipped the air cell, which all chicks do before they pip the shell, but was met by a gush of fluid that drowned him. It was a sad ending to an overall successful hatch. We had eight out the Marans and eight out of our eggs hatch.

The folks at the Backyard Chicken Forum were helpful in solving what seemed like a mystery to me. The humidity spike was just too high for too long. But I have leaned from all of this : to be much more careful about letting the humidity rise too high. Some have recommended a range of 60-65%. Also, I think I will go back to hatching just one dozen at a time....for now!