February 14, 2010 twenty-six chicken babies were hatched!
They were shipped to us in a small box and the Post office called us early in the morning to come pick them up.
When we first brought them home, it was important to put them under a red, heat lamp to help them stay warm.
Jared had to show each of them where the water was, because it was really important for them to drink water every day.
One by one he took all twenty-six chicks out of the box and let them taste the water.
It was still really early in the morning (7 o"clock) and they were in their new home. They explored in the new box and it was hard to tell them apart because they kept moving around!
As new chicken parents, we spent countless hours watching them sleep, eat and run around. We also spent a lot of time trying to organize and figure out what type of chicken each baby chick was.
We took notes in our handy dandy notebook… and took lots of pictures.
So as to possibly help other new eggers and to further the education of curious non-chicken people, we will share our story and the results of this learning process!
This is the story of how our 26 chicks grew up to be chickens and how one of our grown chickens is now a momma hen.
In North Carolina, it is still cold outside in February and baby chicks need a lot of care as they start out and get stronger.
We set up a really big box (as big as a single bed) inside the house where it is warm for our baby chicks to grow in.
They move around really quickly and with twenty-six babies, it is hard to keep track of them. So we picked them up a lot to check that everything was going okay and we also put leg-bands on them to help us keep track until we could learn their names.
They had to have water and food available all of the time and they spent a lot of time sleeping under the warm light.
Because we didn't have any momma hens, we had to check them like a momma would and help them if they needed help.
We started with towels for them to walk on so they wouldn't try to eat the wood bedding. We didn't want our baby chicks to have tummy-aches.
By day 3, the chicks knew what food was and what the ground was, so we removed the towels.
Chicks start out with really soft down feathers and by day 3, they were already starting to get wing feathers! They grow really, really fast!
For snacks, we would give them yogurt, scrambled eggs, and cut up apples. We wanted them to grow up healthy, so we gave them yummy snacks.
When we brought snacks, they would all gather around the food dishes and it was like a moving ball of fluff! They still really like all of the same snacks and also raisins, watermelon and tomatoes!
As we watched them eat their snacks, we saw that each chick had a little different color and pattern. Some were fluffier than others, some had fur all the way down their legs, and some had different colored feet.
We gave them fresh water and snacks every day to help them grow!
Some chicks were easy to tell apart from the others because they were very unique and had special markings.
To help recognize them, we gave them nick-names, like "wobbly" for the one that had really long legs and wobbled while she walked, and "blue" or "black" or "yellow" according to the color of their down feathers. We also had nick-names for special markings like "chipmunk" or for their size like "runt" for the smallest.
We have two cats that live in the house and they were very curious about the chirps and new smells. We let them come in to see the baby chicks, but we always stayed very close and kept a barrier between the cats and the baby birds. Cats think they should catch birds and that might hurt our baby chicks. We made sure we closed the door to the baby chick room when we were not around so that the cats could not sneak in.
As the baby chicks grew, they would stretch and clean their new feathers. They were inside an egg growing for twenty-one days and so they stretched as they learned how to balance on one leg and how to straighten their wings out.
The baby chicks liked to sleep next to each other and this helped them to stay warm.
Every day, we could see them get a little bit bigger and get new feathers. We could hear them peeping even when the door was closed as they talked to each other and explored in the box.
We kept the heat lamp on all the time to keep them warm. We checked on them every day and took pictures and videos every day.
Taking pictures and keeping notes helped us figure out what the name of each baby chick was.
We had to look in books and use the computer to figure out some of the more tricky names or breeds. Now we've given them each a special name, but we know the breed of all of our chickens.
Here are some pictures to show what the chicks looked like as babies and what they grew up to look like as hens or roosters.
Twenty-six chicks!
The final delivery from our breed selection from MurrayMcMurray catalog included:
1 Buff Rock
1 Speckled Sussex
3 Partridge Rocks
1 Red star
2 Barred Rock
2 Black star
1 Silver Laced Wyandotte
2 Delaware
1 Light Brahma
2 Blue Andalusians
1 rare exotic chick = Dark Brahma rooster
4 Araucana/Americana
1 Lakenvelder rooster
1 Egyptian Faomi
1 Golden Campine
1 Partridge Cochin
1 Dominique
chick#3 R foot blue
Grapefruit
"Grapefruit" on the left (with "Patches" our red star on the right)
#20 L foot Blue
#21 L foot Yellow
#22 L foot Black
See the stripes starting on the new wing feathers.
Partridge Rock pullet
Partridge Rock hen
Partridge rock Hen
#10 R foot blue
#13 R foot yellow
Barred Rock hen
"Jail birds"
#11 R foot Black
"Silver" aka "Elvis" (Silver laced Wyandotte hen)
Black and gray white/yellow face
L foot black
See how there are really little feathers going down her leg.
Light Brahma pullet – see how now she has feathers down along her toes.
"Socks"
chick #6
Gray/black color with furry feet
Dark brahma
Dark Brahma "pullet"...
...Turned into a Dark Brahma rooster
(This was a real surprise, because his comb is not tall - it is called a pea comb and because he did not crow until the other dominant roosters were gone.)
"Boots" (Dark Brahma rooster)
Was he trying to tell us early on that he was a rooster?
Boots crowing
His crow sounds like an old car aaaaaa-ruuuuu-ggaaaa horn
#2 L foot black
#4 L foot white
Easily identified as our Delaware ladies (because we didn't order any other white birds)
Delaware pullet
Delaware hen
"Colonel Sanders Jr. and Colonel Sanders Jr.Jr."
Delaware hens
Chick #23 L foot blue
Chick #24 R foot blue
(one of them started showing early signs of becoming a rooster – this was easier to see because we had one rooster and one hen and they looked different as they got bigger)
Meet Marco and Pollo our Blue Andalusian rooster and hen
"Marco" (Blue Andalusian rooster)
"Pollo" aka "Blue" (Blue Andalusian hen)
#26 Mask L foot yellow
Eagle L foot white #9
Blonde Chipmunk #17
Yellow #1 no band
Chick # 26
Dark with chipmunk markings
Turned into a dark Easter Egger
Yellow chipmunk markings = chick #17
Eagle light chipmunk #9
Turned into light Easter Eggers
Note the dark beard at the cheeks and the pea comb.
Easter egger hen – they are called an easter egger because they lay green or blue eggs
"The bearded ladies"
Our mystery Easter Egger started out very light
Chick #1
Turned into a Easter Egger
"Peanut" see how she also has the pea comb of a Easter Egger hen
Light masked
Chick #19 R foot white
Turned into our Speckled Sussex
"Speckles"
R foot yellow
Chick # 5
Red star pullet
And now she's a Red star hen
"Patches" (Red Star hen)
#14 L foot yellow
#15 L foot black
Black Star hen
"Black and Jack" (Black Star hens)
Woobly #18
"Wobbly" was a beautiful chick with a distinctive eye color
She turned into a Golden Campine
Golden Campine pullet
"Goldie hen" aka "Goldie Pox" (Golden Campine hen)
– which we have voted our favorite chicken for her markings - and note the blue feet!
Her favorite snack is raisins
As grown hens, you can tell the difference by their comb
#12 R foot white
As chicks, you might notice that around the beak, this one had black instead of any white.
Dominique chick
Dominique hen "Jail bird"
(Barred rock chick –white around the beak) vs Dominique chick
Barred Rock hen = Single comb vs Dominique hen = Rose comb
Runt = #16
Turned into Egyptian Faomi
"Cleo"
This is too funny not to include (her fluffing her feathers)
Chick #8
We could tell from early on that this was our Partridge Cochin
"Mrs. Shinn"
Our mystery chick
Chick #25
This was a hard one to figure out b/c it was our "free rare-exotic rooster"
Turned out to be a Lakenvelder rooster
As a cockerel
"Hans"
"Grapefruit" on the left (with "Patches" our red star on the right)
Now our next generation and chicken adventure has begun - cross-breeding and letting broody hens hatch out baby chicks!
Here is our first successful momma with two babies – one dark, fluffy and one blond, fuzzy chipmunk! Grapefruit hatched them; however they are the product of an Easter Egger mom and a Dark Brahma dad. They both have puffy cheeks and a little bit of fur on their legs!
They were born in November 2010
Now that they're older, we can tell that one is a rooster and one is a hen.
We named the rooster Buttons and the hen Mittens.
Can you tell which one is the rooster?
The mittens and buttons show!
Dark Brahma rooster (bottom right)
Easter egger hen (bottom left)
Cross rooster Dark Brahma/Easter egger (top right)
Cross hen Dark Brahma/Easter egger (top left)
Resources that we have found helpful and that you might like:
Mypetchicken.com
Backyard Chicken magazine
Gayle Damerow's books
MurrayMcMurray