Sunshine causes a ruckus August 3, 2011

Sunshine seen brooding over a few marked eggs.

Sunshine and her peep

Some of you already know this, but my buff cochin bantam hen had gone broody a few weeks ago.  Well, it must have been a good 3 weeks (21 days) ago now because when Brent went to put up the chickens last night and collect eggs, he heard a distinct peeping!  First we found Sunshine tucked in the far right back corner of the  coop where she was determinedly nestled down in the fine nest she had made for herself.  Upon further investigation, we found one little darling peep bouncing around her mama! What a good mama she seems to be, too!  She is still diligently sitting on two more eggs so we will wait a couple more days to see if anyone else emerges!

Pipsqueak (silver Sebright hen) is in the foreground, Zooxanthellae (brown leghorn hen) in the background

Actually, I think it was our other bantam silver Sebright hen, Pipsqueak, who originally carved out that corner for a nest and tried to sit broody over some eggs.  Brent kept fetching them from her every day and so she eventually gave up.  When Sunshine next went broody, Brent took pity on her and let her keep three of her own eggs as an experiment to see what would happen.  I mean, of course it seems obvious what would happen but it is really seems like such a miraculous thing to just sort of happen on its own without us big important (meddling) humans helping things along!

The popularity of this nest for laying makes it difficult for us to determine whose eggs she is sitting on because many of our chickens like to come along and shove Sunshine out of the way to lay their own eggs each day.  Because of their size and color, we know for sure they are either hers or our other bantam cochin, Cinnamon’s.  Each day we would collect all the other eggs and leave only the three cochin eggs that were marked.  This made it easy not confuse the newly laid cochin eggs with the ones she had already begun incubating.

We were not sure whether to leave her and her peep in the coop among the other hens overnight or not because we were afraid they may injury or kill the new little one.  We figured we had three options.  1. We could leave them put and hope for the best.  Since chickens are well known for pecking order disputes in which the weakest get creamed, the risks of this choice are obvious.  2.  We could remove Sunshine, the peep, the nest and the rest of the eggs and put them in the large dog kennel set up to be a coop of their own.  The problems with this choice were, where to put the kennel and how hard would it be to reintegrate Sunshine and her peeps with the rest of the flock in a couple weeks?  3. Finally, we could try to fashion a coop within the main coop so that they could have protection but still be in close proximity to the rest of the flock to ease estrangement issues.  We were losing light and the mosquitoes were biting so we settled on option 1.  Afterall, after dark our chickens seem to do little more than sleep anyways so we figured they would be safe until morning …and they were!

The girls gather to complain.

An irritated Eyebrows

This morning we left the other hens out to free-range as per usual and we let Sunshine stay on her nest with her new peep beside her.  This worked out fine until we let the roosters out.  Seems they have gotten in the habit of paying Sunshine repeated visits as she is helpless to fight them off in her current state.  We managed to chase all but one of them off.  Mr. Frizzle,  one of our white silkie roos seems to have taken it upon himself to hang around and keep Sunshine company.  Perhaps he’s the dad?

The next problem arose when it was time for the hens to lay for the day.   Those that usually like to share Sunshine’s nest were persistent at doing so again today.  We did not want them back there in case they would accidentally or purposely hurt the peep.

The make-shift partition.

Brent had to erect a make-shift chicken wire fence to portion off the back end of the coop to try to provide the new little family with some privacy.  Eyebrows, our Ameraucana was not at all pleased and tried repeatedly to force her way past the fencing in order to make it to her usual nesting spot.  You’ll notice in the picture that we set her up with her own feed and water station.  We were poorly prepared for this hatch and therefore did not have any chick starter mash on hand.  Egg layer is only good for laying birds so we mashed up some game bird feed (high protein) and filled the feeder with that.  Brent was lucky enough to observe Sunshine showing her peep how to use the feeders!  She seemed to catch on pretty quickly, too!  The nice thing about this set-up is that it allows Sunshine and the peep to be exposed to the rest of the flock day and night in a way that everyone can become accustomed to the sight and sound of the new addition so that when Sunshine is ready to venture out to free-range with her clutch, there will be less likelihood of integration issues.

Seeing as I live in a suburban setting and already have my hands (and coop) full of 9 assorted hens and 5 assorted roosters, some people have asked why on the good green Earth would we even entertain the idea of raising up more peeps?!  I guess it really comes down to sustainability again.  Chickens don’t lay eggs forever.  In fact, the best laying years for chickens occur until they are about 3 depending on breed and after that their egg production begins to drop off noticeably.  So if you want to guarantee a constant supply of eggs, you have to plan to replace your flock every couple few years.  And of course in order to replace your flock you can either buy peeps from suppliers or you can let your chickens raise their own.  This time around we did not need to raise up more to replace our current flock yet but we wanted to experiment to see just how easy it would be.  As you can see, there are some logistics to be worked out, but otherwise the process seems to largely take care of itself!

A new home for our quail! June 3, 2011

Last month a generous friend of ours took pity on us for losing a few of our newly purchased  quail peeps.  Apparently the feed store we got them at had a bad shipment that ended up with many casualties.  We lost a handful of bantam peeps as well as some quail.  Our friend had just had major success rearing a big batch of quail eggs in her home incubator and offered us 30 quail if we wanted them!  IF we wanted them?!  HA!  Of course we wanted them!

We brought them home in the cardboard box she delivered them to us in.  They were overcrowded and messy.  We knew we had to find a better home and fast so we set up the large dog kennel for them that we had previously used as a brooder bin for our chicken peeps back in December 2010.  I thought we had taken a pic of this stage, but apparently not because there is none to be found.  It soon became obvious that they are crazy, messy eaters who often dump their water bowl and poop alot!  Living in the kennel long-term, running around in their own mess was not going to work.

We thought we could toss them in chicken run 1.0 and then just enclose one end of it for them to take shelter in at night, but I found out from my research they unlike chickens, they will not put themselves to bed at night in a coop and in fact, don’t use nesting boxes or roosts at all!  They prefer the cover of plants and although they do have some flight ability, they can not sustain flight and are instead considered ground birds.

Here are some pics Griff took from inside the run.  You can see the quail happily enjoying the dirt and grass and sunshine.  I swear that if you click to enlarge the pics, you can see some smiling!

Although the quail enjoyed running free in this structure all day, we could not leave them in it overnight as it has no bottom and predators could easily dig under to get at them under cover of dark.  We thought about screening off the bottom for them, but that would interfere with their ability to scratch and dirt bathe.

We took to setting them free in the run each day and scooping them up each night to replace them in the kennel which stayed on the screened in lanai.  This gave us the perfect chance to clean out the smelly kennel each day.  It’s not hard work but does create a daily amount of waste that we add to our compost pile.  These guys are so messy, you are going to want to change the bedding regularly and not just let them reuse it day to day.

The problem with this schedule is that we needed a person small enough to climb into the quail run but mature enough to capture them without hurting them.  Let me tell you, these little buggers are fast and accomplished escape artists!  Handing them off to the person waiting outside the run to put them back in the kennel was no easy effort!  Since he is zipper-thin, Logan/13 was able to help with this job a a few times, but most times it has fallen to Griffin/9 to have to do.  We promised him it would be temporary and set out to make plans for another option.

Since we are planning to sell our house and move soon, we did not want to invest the time and effort in building another wooden/screened coop/run right away.  Afterall, hubby has alot of other things to finish up around here and we already have 3 chicken structures in the backyard that we need to ditch before we start showing the house! I did check online for used or prebuilt, portable quail or chicken coop/runs but had no luck.

In the meantime, I was making plans to bring our bantam golden sebright rooster, Burnt Toast, home from his sabbatical at our friend’s farm in Brooksville where he has spent the last couple months, so I was also browsing around online to find a large bird cage I could put him in at night so that he would not wake the neighbors each morning with his high-pitched crowing (which is what earned him the sabbatical in the first place).  I found a gal local to me who had a nice deal on a large bird cage in nice condition so I grabbed it up and when I saw how easy it was to clean the tray at the bottom, I thought it might be good to try it for use with the quail community!

Here they are in their new digs!  The large cage detaches from its rolling stand and has 2 large doors on the front of the cage that lock shut.  There are 2 smaller doors on the sides of the cage at the top.  There is a removable tray at the bottom that will be easy to line and clean.  The wire bottom is also removable for ease of cleaning.  We added a hanging plant, a perch and some boxes to hide in.  Of course this new set-up does not address their need to scratch and dust bathe, but we do plan to add some other plants on the bottom level to address that need.  They get much more light and fresh air with this arrangement so we figure it is good enough at least for the short term!  They are using the extra vertical space as flight space to spread their wings.  Once we are in our new house, another version of quail habitat might develop but this is home sweet home for quail right now!

And look!  They must be happy because we get one of these every day now!