Wednesday, October 1, 2008

downsizing


These are our teenagers. There were six, but one of the black and whites was beheaded by a predator. They're not as old as our original chickens, and not as young as our chicks. (Well, we call them chicks, but they've long outgrown the cute fuzzy yellow stage.)

The teenagers are our friendliest chickens. The old birds are kinda jumpy (it doesn't help that they peck at the coffee grounds in the compost), and the new birds are the jumpy birds' progeny. The teenagers seem to like people, and they're not so skittish.

We only ever wanted to collect eggs, but now we have so many birds that we're contemplating downsizing to just the teenagers and maybe a rooster. Perhaps we'll meet some people who just moved out to the country and are interested in raising chickens....

2 comments:

Julia said...

How many eggs do you find per day? Sounds like a small business in the making!

Ooh, and I posted a comment on cameras that I think got lost in the ether, but if you are still looking for recommendations here's a quick sum. Basically - Panasonic good. TZ5A for automatic, FZ7 for more manual work.

countrypeapie said...

For a while we gathered six or seven eggs a day. It was really fun collecting old cartons and giving eggs away, because there was no way we could eat them all. But after we caught a couple of rat snakes stealing eggs from the coop, the hens started laying elsewhere, and slowly the number of gathered eggs dwindled to three, then two, and finally only one a day. Pretty disappointing to have so many chickens and so few eggs! The teenagers and chicks aren't laying yet, so we're doing everything we can to make the coop cubbies appealing.

Thanks for the camera advice. Panasonic made the best boom box I ever had.