borborygmosity

My Chickupine breeding program is coming along well. I've been breeding my chickens with a porcupine to make a quilled chicken in hopes that they will be less susceptible to predators.

This is a close-up of a wing...

And this is a close-up of a thigh...

Results are very encouraging, so far. When I get all the bugs worked out, I'll patent them and make millions of dollars.

Took a picture of the eggs the chickens laid today...

That's a pretty average day, now that the pullets are laying well. Some days we get a few less or a few more. We have fifteen brown-egg layers (Red Stars and Black Stars), five white-egg layers (Brown Leghorns), and five Easter-Eggers. The peach-colored egg in the back-right is actually from an Easter-Egger. They can lay blue, green, pinky, or purple eggs. Since they are basic'ly a mutt breed, there's no way to tell what color an individual EE will lay until she starts. Each bird lays the same color her whole life.

I found an older picture from a day when four of the five Leghorns laid...

The eggs from the new birds will get bigger after a while.

I cut through the wall and put the window in this weekend. I have to get some rubber flashing to weatherproof it. Then, I can set the window permanently...

The new hens are laying well... We've had five days with more than nine eggs. They're still pretty small, so I eat three instead of two...

For scale, the pan is eight inches in diameter. Can you guess which is the blue egg?

Yeah!!! We have blue eggs...

Of course, Kelly found them. A handful of the new chooks are laying... We got ten eggs today. That's the most since Slaughter Day back at the end of June.

Yeah! One of the new chickens has laid an egg! Prob'ly...

It's brown, so it would be one of the Black Stars. Or, one of the lazy Red Stars has started to lay again.

I took a picture of the pullets when I was out in the coop today...

I let them in with the hens a couple weeks ago. The new birds have taken over the roost... At least, during the day. At night, the Red Stars are up there. The mostly black birds are Black Stars. The dark brown birds are Rose-combed Brown Leghorns. And the brown birds with grey and the big heads are the Easter Eggers.

The new pullets are almost full-sized. If I counted out the weeks correctly, they should start laying by the end of the month.

This is an Easter Egger...

She will lay blue, or green, or pinky-purple eggs.

This is "Miss Honk"...

She is a Black Star. She will lay brown eggs.

And, there are also Rose-combed Brown Leghorns, which will lay white eggs.

Here's a picture of Brinski on his walk out to the woods...

We slaughtered ten more piggies, and took him out at the same time. He was a beautiful bird, and we would have kept him, but he was way too big for the hens we have now. We'll prob'ly get a smaller rooster next spring... We like hearing them crow.

We let the chickens out into the fenced in yard betwixt the main yard and the kennel. They had a grand day scratching through the leaf and compost piles looking for bugs...

We left the doors open for them, and they found their way back to the nest boxes when it was time to lay an egg. Kody would occasionally sit at the gate and watch them.

In other chicken news, I moved the eleven little piggies out to the kennel, so there are no more (living) chickens in the basement.

Took some pictures of the chooks today.

A Red Star in a nest box...

She was sitting on two eggs.

The pen I built for the new hens...

The old hens weren't really happy that I took up so much of their space.

The new hens in their pen...

And, here are the piggies...

At five weeks old, ten of them weighed thirty-two pounds.