Kitchen Garden Forum

It's fingers-crossed weekend now. Looking forward to two good sets of chicks over Monday night and Tuesday.

Will there be pictures forthcoming, Alan?

oldherbaceous wrote:Will there be pictures forthcoming, Alan?

Bydd! (Which is Welsh for Yes, there will be!)

I can remember when I was 12 and my broody hen hatched 8 chicks off, a very special feeling indeed....

My job as a lad during WW2 to service the paraffin 40 egg incubator. Always a source of interest on hatching day to see them emerge from the shell, come towards the light, then drop into the drying chamber below.

Not a perfect hatch, but fortunately the losses were mainly the extra mixed eggs put under the broodies to make up numbers. In the end we have four Exchequer Leghorns with the Blackrock broody and four Cream Legbars (three female and one male) from the Plymouth Rock broody. The pictures are the Leghorns at barely two days old. The Legbars were out and feeding with Mum yesterday at less than a day from hatch, but they're under her wings at the moment. Pictures when they are a bit older.

That's not bad alan, their is a few bobs worth there

Brilliant news, Alan, a lovely little clutch of chicks....

A nice surprise this morning. Not four Leghorn chicks but FIVE. Every time we saw them yesterday and when I took the pictures she must have had one or another under her wing!

After the joy of seeing the chicks first hatched, the next pleasure is seeing the wing feathers emerging through the fluff. It's first noticeable after just two days and now, four days from hatch the wings are twice as long. They're all greedy eaters!
Next thing, fingers crossed, will be Welsh Harlequin ducklings; the eggs went in the incubator yesterday.

They're just so adorable when they're this size arn't they? Yiu have to enjoy this stage while it lasts because unlike other young animals they grow and change so much more quickly.

Go forth and multiply, or to quote correctly from Genesis: "And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein"
Well, one of our Blackrocks must have been reading the good book! She had been missing for a week and surfaced for a snack and a drink this morning. We followed her back and watched her jump into her nest in the hedge behind the wheelie bins. It's clearly got her own eggs, fathered by Gwyndaf the Welsummer cock, and she is definitely sitting them. The hedge is what here we call a clawdd, which is a low dry-stone wall with soil in the middle topped by a hawthorn hedge - a very safe place. But how she or we will get the chicks and her out safely remains to be seen! If it works, we can't get more natural than that.
Elsewhere, the eighteen Welsh Harlequin duck eggs in the incubator will be candled tomorrow to see how many are fertile and likely to hatch.

Nature often just gets on with things, and still has some lovely surprises to share....

Quick update on our rapidly expanding family.
It doesn't look as thought the broody in the hedge is achieving anything, which could turn out to be a relief.
Seventeen Welsh Harlequin duck eggs in the incubator are due to hatch a week from today.
The four Cream Legbars have been moved from their broody coop with their "mother" to a larger house.
We've set ten Black Copper MaransXCream Legbar under another broody in the vacated broody coop. They will be our first try at getting MarsBar chicks!