Myth…and unfair to roos. Our New Hampshire/Brown Leghorn rooster, Fache, crows periodically throughout the day, usually to call the hens back. He’s not the noisy one, though – a few of the hens make him look quiet and restrained.
One loudmouth is Rosie, an Australorp. She’s bossy and quick to start complaining, loudly, if another hen is in the nest box she wants. And she goes on and on. Not only is she loud, but the squawking is in a register that’s pretty unpleasant, and she seems to build to a crescendo. Rosie’s vocalizations probably wouldn’t be appreciated in a more suburban “backyard chicken” setting, even though she’s a hen and can’t crow.
Today’s drama was related to another hen being happily settled in the nest box Rosie apparently wanted. Continue reading “Only Roosters Are Noisy?”
Is broodiness really contagious? Coraline’s ducklings are now seven weeks old, and another Muscovy duck has gone broody. This time, it’s Coraline’s pal Phoebe. Phoebe looks a lot like Coraline, minus the white neck band, and has a gentle, low-key personality.
One of the pure stock Brown Leghorns hatched in Batch 1 is a friendly girl we call Tatiana (“Tati” for short). She has beautiful wild coloring and a funny floppy comb – just like her mom did – that hangs over her eye and looks like 80’s bangs.
We opened one of the pullet eggs this morning and discovered that it was actually a double-yolker! It’s not uncommon for pullets to lay a few double-yolked eggs initially, but this was a perfect miniature.
Photo 1 shows three regular chicken eggs, two duck eggs, and the twin yolks of the pullet egg in the center of the bowl. Photo 2 is a comparison of pullet egg to (standard) hen egg.
Goldie left the nest with the three unhatched eggs in it yesterday and took her three chicks to the opposite end of the brooder. We took this as a sign that she knew the remaining eggs weren’t going to hatch, so we took them out. Not wanting to risk tossing a viable egg, and to try to better understand why they didn’t hatch, we decided to open them. Carefully. Outdoors.
We’re still finding shell-less and soft-shelled (rubber) eggs, eggs smashed from dropping onto the poop board (like they just fell out of the roosting hens) and, today, a very strange-looking egg.