Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Chickens and stuff

I decided to do a post on chickens in general. Here is a picture of the chicken coop. As you can see, it has three rooms in it. The room in the middle is the main coop. The room on the right is the brooder room. The other room is a spare room.

In the main room, the roosts are attached to a rope so I can easily lift them when I clean the coop. The feeder is under the nests.

The brooder room. The extra saw horse is for the chicks to perch on. (This picture is an older one so the chicks are smaller. The really small chicks are the broilers and leghorn.)

One of the chicks. These chicks are now free ranging but they don't go far from the coop yet.

A few weeks ago, my family went to town but I didn't go with them. They called and said that there were some chicks at the feed store but from the description, I thought they were close to the age of my chicks. I told them to get five white leghorns. It turns out they were about three or four weeks younger than my chicks. After I got them, I kept a close eye on them to make sure the other chicks weren't bothering them. Everything seemed fine until I realized four of the five chicks were not white leghorns but cornish crosses. I figured it might be a good thing they were broilers since they would grow fast so they'd catch up with the other chicks.
All was going well until I got a cold. Mom was taking care of my chickens when the other chicks decided the broilers, who by this time were about the same size as the other chicks, tasted good. Luckily, I went to the coop before they were all killed. One was dead so I separated the three remaining broilers and the leghorn and put them in the other room.
Pictured here are the three broilers and the one leghorn. They are the same age and you can see the difference in size and shape.

Here are the wild geese and their goslings. This is the first year they've raised their goslings on our reservoir.

They are a little older in this picture.

Jessi

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