We have backyard chickens. Things are not going well at the ol’ family farm (the chicken coop out by our pool pump) Buffy the Buff Orpington went broody this summer. I got her some fertilized silkie/polish/frizzle barnyard mix eggs from a neighbor to switch out and see if we could hatch our own chicks. Buffy got fowl pox while she was broody. Why don’t they call it human pox? But that’s why she looks leprous in this photo. I thought she was going to die because she was just sitting in the coop on these eggs in the middle of the Texan summer for 3 weeks. She hatched 4 chicks. I made her scrambled eggs to celebrate the success of Operation: Chickfinity.
I hatched off about 200 chicks last summer, with my last broody hen hatching hers on Christmas Day. What? Does she not have a calendar? They were only a week old when temperatures dropped into the single digits at night and low 20s during the day.
She must be a good mom though, because she still has 6 chicks left, even though the hawks hover right outside the chicken house door waiting for her little chicks to pop out for a moment. :-/
Anyway, multiple critters and predators have killed off most of my new hatchlings, but I still have about a dozen too many roosters. They're going in the cooker as soon as it warms up enough to butcher them. I really hate butchering and plucking when it's in the 30's though. It hardly seems worth it for a tough chicken to eat except that my hens are getting really sick and tired of being chased all day.
Good luck re-homing Romeo. Too bad you can't talk your neighbors into just waking up a bit early. They make the best alarm clocks in the world.
He's a beaut, that's for sure. We just got backyard chickens. Brought 5 Olive Eggers home when they were just a few days old. Fingers crossed they're all hens. They're 6 weeks now so we should know before too much longer. I'd take Romeo in a heartbeat but I think our neighbors wouldn't like to be woken at 5 a.m. by a rooster either.
I hatched off about 200 chicks last summer, with my last broody hen hatching hers on Christmas Day. What? Does she not have a calendar? They were only a week old when temperatures dropped into the single digits at night and low 20s during the day.
She must be a good mom though, because she still has 6 chicks left, even though the hawks hover right outside the chicken house door waiting for her little chicks to pop out for a moment. :-/
Anyway, multiple critters and predators have killed off most of my new hatchlings, but I still have about a dozen too many roosters. They're going in the cooker as soon as it warms up enough to butcher them. I really hate butchering and plucking when it's in the 30's though. It hardly seems worth it for a tough chicken to eat except that my hens are getting really sick and tired of being chased all day.
Good luck re-homing Romeo. Too bad you can't talk your neighbors into just waking up a bit early. They make the best alarm clocks in the world.
He's a beaut, that's for sure. We just got backyard chickens. Brought 5 Olive Eggers home when they were just a few days old. Fingers crossed they're all hens. They're 6 weeks now so we should know before too much longer. I'd take Romeo in a heartbeat but I think our neighbors wouldn't like to be woken at 5 a.m. by a rooster either.