Friday, 22 August 2014

Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken….

It's a beautiful day today here at Budle Bay Croft.

Makes cleaning the chickens out so much better.

Not that it is such a terrible job really.

They all sleep on a perch in each of the hen houses, Shabby Chics, Clucks Away and Sleepy Hens. And all their poo drops onto the straw in a really neat line!

We have any number of random chickens on the croft, including two rather splendid cockerels, One-Eyed Sam (yip, you guessed it), and Suggs (he has fluffy legs that look like baggy trousers).

A lot of our girls were rescued battery hens - arriving bald as coots and dis-guarded because their laying quota dropped.

What is really sweet is that with a bit of love and attention, the occasional worming and lots of fruity treats, they soon come back to full strength, and lay more than we can ever dip our soldiers in!

Hens are funny little things - they each have their own personality, and there is definitely a pecking order.  Any new chickens introduced have to "fight" for their position in the coop, and we always try to introduce more than one at a time, or we spray the coop with perfume so they all smell the same - co-co-rel chanel is the favourite!

Chickens eat everything and anything in sight - bread, worms, bugs, newly planted lavender even, and they have a particular penchant for last night's tea. Their main staple though is mixed corn.

Most of our chickens are incredibly tame, coming to greet you as you get out of the car, and even eating corn out of little offering hands.

At this time of year, the hens lay lots of eggs - more than we and our cottage guests' can manage!  We have all sorts of different sizes and colours of eggs. Blue ones, white ones, brown ones, beige ones, speckle ones even, and we often have a little joke with our younger guests - asking them to take part in a little "egg"speriment, to see whether the blue eggs have blue yolks!

Did you know that if you feed the chickens too much beetroot you can turn their eggs a pinky hue, and if they eat spicy food, they lay spice-laced yolks?

Normally, the yolks are a vibrant yellow, almost fluorescent, due to the large amount of grass and greens the chickens consume each day.

It is a firm favourite of our cottage guests (young and young at heart) to collect the freshly laid eggs each morning - sometimes so fresh they are still warm!

What cuts the egg yield down is when one of the ladies decides she wants to start clocking.

Clocking is when a broody hen sits in the nesting box on a batch of eggs, not always her own, and if fertilised (i.e. if you have a cockerel) after 3 weeks, in theory, they should turn into fluffy chicks.

They are usually such good mums - hardly leaving their post for 21 days. They do sometimes get confused about which eggs are the hatching ones though, as for some bizarre reason, other hens try to lay on the nest.

The hardest part by far though is when they hatch - trying to keep them safe from predators like buzzards, otters and weasels is a nightmare.

We sometimes put the hen and her chicks onto a guinea pig hutch or smaller run, but the mum can reject the young when moved, and without their mum around, they are not only vulnerable to being lifted, but they also don't know how to become a chicken!

One of the loveliest quirks about hens is that when they are broody, they will mother anything. We regularly have ducklings being reared by hens, and the ducklings really think they are little chicks until they reach maturity. So sweet!

Well, thats the Budle Bay Croft chickens introduced to you. Watch this space for hatching updates over the next couple of weeks, mother nature permitting!

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