Today we took our batch of grade-school chicks from the brooder in the garage they've been inhabiting for the past several weeks and added them to the batch of jr. high chicks that were vacated from the same brooder a couple of weeks ago and put in an enclosure fashioned underneath our trampoline as a halfway house. We put them there so our flock of eight free-ranging hens could get to know them through the plastic webbing without being able to peck them to pieces.
It's a bit stressful, wondering if their eventual introduction to the main coop is going to result in avicide; established chicken flocks REALLY don't like newcomers. But there are 14 newcomers, and although five of them are bantams (1 Buff Brahma Bantam, 2 White Silkies---they look like the chicken equivalent of a French poodle---1 Silver Sebright, 1 Golden Sebright), the other nine are various breeds of laying hen (2 Silver-Laced Wyandottes, 1 Black Sex Link, 1 Red Sex Link, 3 Cuckoo Marans, a Buff Orpington, and a Light Brahma.) I sincerely hope the establishment of the pecking order doesn't involve any bloodshed, and that there will be safety in numbers for the newcomers.
The Cuckoo Marans are a French breed that resemble the black-and-white speckled Plymouth Barred Rocks, but they lay deep chocolate brown eggs. Although the spelling is slightly different, I love the idea of us cuckoo Marrans having Cuckoo Marans!
The bantams and Light Brahma we got based on their reputation for being good brooders, so that one or more of them can eventually raise up the next generation of feed store chicks. (While they're cute, the responsibility of doing it ourselves gets old.) Some of them might turn out to be roosters, as they only sell the bantams straight run. We will re-home any roosters, as we want to be good neighbors, and get some sleep ourselves. The robins are bad enough, starting to sing vociferously at 3:49 AM (not that I'm looking at the clock or anything)...I can't imagine listening to roosters joining the fray!
Tonight there was a thunderstorm, with quite a good deluge and some hail to boot. I put a covering over the 1/4 of the trampoline that was directly over their cardboard box shelters and feed, but when I checked on them after dark, the six youngest chicks that were spending their first night outside were bedded down in the grass next to the netting. I reached under the netting and grabbed five of them up and relocated them to their cardboard coop, but the last one scuttled into the center of the enclosure, out of my reach. I squoze through the gap between the netting and the trampoline mat and picked up the chick, which started squawking like it was about to be dinner, and plopped it unceremoniously in the cardboard coop with its compatriots. The only chick bright enough to have taken refuge in the box was the little Light Brahma. What can I say...they originated in India!
I guess I've become somewhat blase about chickens since we first brought home chicks from the feed store two years ago. Those six girls were very well-documented in photos and videos. I've only taken a couple snapshots of these latest batches. (This year, we even raised seven chicks for my daughter's dance teacher!) I'll have to take some more photos now that they're all mostly feathered out, but here, for the record, is one of our peepers (Silver-Laced Wyandotte.) Good night!
