At last, after 4 months of planning and lots of setbacks, I got my chickens yesterday!
They are the most beautiful, cleverest, sweetest girls ever!
I think I'm in love!
OK enough with the exclamation marks! Here are some details:
I have six pullets of three different breeds, all aged between 12 and 17 weeks. I need to email the breeder and ask him to tell me again who is what age, because my visit to pick them up is a bit of a blur.
They are:
2 x Light Sussex (Sylvia and Pearl)
2 x Barred Plymouth Rocks (Elsie and Phoebe)
2 x Barnevelders (Minnie-Rose and Patience)
I picked them up yesterday afternoon and brought them home in my non-air conditioned car on a 27 degree day, with an hour and a half driving time, so we were all a bit stressed by the time we got home. The girls went into their shady coop with some bowls of cool water and I left them alone for a couple of hours. They were soon looking better.
On the advice of the breeder (a lovely, helpful man) I gave them a bowl of food at 4pm. It was their usual food (he uses the same brand I have) mixed with a bit of water to make it like damp muesli. They scoffed the lot, as well as some worms I dug up for them and a handful of greens. They have dry food and water on demand, but seemed to like the wet stuff much better.
I sat on an upturned bucket in their coop for the rest of the afternoon, getting to know them, letting them get used to me and deciding on their names. Just as well it eventually got dark or I would still be sitting there.
At 7pm they ate a bit of dry food, had a drink of water, then started looking up for the first time - looking for a place to roost!
I told you they were clever!
I left them to it so I wouldn't scare them off their perches when I got up to leave. Then later on I peeped in and they were all roosting - not on their perches but on the dresser which will eventually have their nest boxes on it.
Today I'm going to fence off a smallish area within their large run and let them out of their coop for the first time. While they are outside I will refine a few things like the height of their water dispenser so they can't poo in it, and try to work out why they wanted to sleep on the dresser instead of the perches, which are higher.
So finally I have joined the ranks of the real chicken keepers. Hooray!
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June 18, 2014, 17:06