New arrivals

Very handsome gang. They look strangely bald without combs!

I found the above picture of Blackberry (and her friend Apple who was a Blacktail). You can't really see Blackberry's beautiful golden colouring on her breast, but it's the only photo I've got as the flash drive with several year's photos stored on it developed a problem. This was a stray picture I stored on a CD.

Timely reminder to save photos on more than one device, Dandelion!
Beautiful looking birds

Well, finally the first blue egg has arrived! It's a slightly greyish blue and I haven't seen the inside yet. Must be Mama Olga's as Igor's are due to be more olive coloured.

Coincidentally, my Rhode rocks started laying a few days ago.  I'm already getting 4 eggs a day from the six of them - small at the moment but they will be a good size quite quickly.  They're lovely birds, I really like them.

Both girls laying now - approx two eggs each in three days. The blue-grey are actually Igor's - the crossbreed, and Mama Olga's are smaller and bluer. Had enough to give two to our egg-man and one each to sis, BiL and niece who popped in at the w/e.

My two Marigolds haven't laid since the autumn (although they are getting on for five years old, so they are quite old ladies). But with the recent restrictions because of bird flu, they're probably so fed-up with being kept in that an egg or two is out of the question!

You can spot the 'character' among my hens! Dandelion at the front is very dominant, but Dot (the speckledy behind her) has managed to keep her place at the top of the pecking order since the new ones arrived. Burdock, the blacktail right at the back is a lovely little hen, quite timid, with a plaintive cry which sounds like a rusty gate sqeaking!

Sadly and quite unexpectedly Dot (the older speckledy hen) died today. She's never been a very robust bird and has had a few problems including never having been a great feeder, so I suppose two years wasn't a bad life(I sometimes wondered how she kept going!). She was a great character and will be missed.

Oh, that's a shame Dandelion. It's quite unusual for a chicken to die from natural causes unless they're very old.

She was bullied by a very dominant hen when she was young, but I didn't realise that it was going on, and it meant that she avoided eating with the others. Despite  me doing everything I could think of to encourage her to eat, she lived on what she could find in the garden, and was always on the scrawny side. She also never really laid eggs - just one or two, and there was always something wrong with them. But she did drink a lot more water than the others (which meant that her droppings were always more of an explosion than a dropping!) so I wonder if her kidneys were under stress. I asked everyone I knew who kept hens for advice but no-one else had heard of this (I did get told to worm her though, which I knew wasn't the issue as I do this regularly). But recently a colleague at work said that one of her hens did exactly the same - she didn't have any advice but at least I knew it wasn't just me! But then the poor hen got flystrike about six weeks ago, which I dealt with, but I think she was in a weakened state. The vet's view, when I talked about the hens with him last year, was that the older hen may have bullied Dot because it was obvious that there was something wrong with her, literally the survival of the fittest. Dot must have been quite strong to have survived this long!

Nice photo, Dandelion, they look a colourful bunch! Sorry to hear that Dot is no longer with you.