State of the flock, June 2018

Cookie (the speckled one) and the kids, May 2018

Well, the integration of the chicks and the main flock was pretty smooth and mostly painless.  Cookie has officially stopped taking care of her latest brood and is laying eggs again:  we think she'll be going broody again soon, though as we don't have an adult rooster, we might ask around for some eggs for her to hatch again.  Why?  We think all four of those chicks are boys!  One's possibly a girl, but I do think at least three and maybe all four are boys.  Oh well.  Chicken on the menu. 

Florry at front looking innocent, May 2018

I recently took drastic measures to ground our escape artist Florry and her partner in crime Rock:  they both got a double amputation to keep them from jumping the fence into the vegetables.  By this I mean instead of clipping just one wing (which is supposed to throw them off balance but was completely ineffective with these two lightweight and very determined birds), I clipped both wings, thus depriving them of lift.  But as a precaution (Florry, especially, doesn't give up), I've put small stakes around all my newly planted vegetables in the hopes she won't scratch them up if she does get over.  More than once this past year I have come very close to giving Florry the chop;  the only thing that stopped me is her prolific egg laying.  Well she's currently laying about one a week now, instead of one a day, but as she's also not jumped the fence since I clipped both wings...

We lost Plucky, our oldest hen last week;  we were hoping she'd make it to her sixth birthday in September:  she really was an old lady.  She was adopted from the British Hen Welfare Trust, as an ex-commercial laying hen, and spent far more of her life as a happy free-ranger than she ever did closed up in a cage in a barn.  Most of our charity adopted hens have lived around three years, though we also have a four and a half year old adopted hen still in the flock.

Currently we have nine adult hens and four juveniles (sex unconfirmed).  We're getting around 4-6 eggs a day:  not bad, really.