International Residents Arrive!

No more strictly “garden variety” chickens for us.  We loved our Rhode Island Reds and Barred Rocks, but this time…

We’ve expanded our clientele!

Off of a craigslist ad (where you can seriously trade almost anything – in this case we traded money for pullets), we bought 4 young hens to re-start our “chicks in a bucket” project.

Halley, a Golden Comet breed, is the most adventurous of the 4, and one of only 2 who would come out for a picture.

We haven’t named our Silver-Laced Wyandotte yet, although the breed hails from New York state, so we’ll be on the lookout for a good name when we go visit the Niagara Falls next weekend.

We’ve named one of the secretive Araucanas Arborio.  We believe this breed, sometimes called Americaunas or Easter Eggers, was first raised by the Incans and lay either blue-, green-, or pinkish-shelled eggs.  Which explains their shy nature – they are used to hiding in or around mountains, and since we don’t have any in the coop, they are just staying hidden under the low boards of the coop.

The jury is still out on what killed our other hens.  I have a live trap set – two nights running the critter has eaten the bait food and not sprung the trap.

And the little hens are in the coop all the time now.  We will let them roam the yard when they are bigger, and no sooner than when we get back from our trip to New York and Canada.  We just don’t want to worry about them while we aren’t home, no matter how far away we are.

Welcome, little friends! Bienvenido al cul-de-sac!

We can’t resist

Day Two Chicks

Day Three Chicks Again

So here we are, living in plain old sort-of-big-city Kansas on practically an entire acre, “wishing we were somehow here again…” oh, wait, that’s a song.  Yeah, so we caught up with some of our amazing Peace Corps friends (we knew them LAST CENTURY!!!), and that made us think about the good old days.

We had chickens, when we lived in the tropical rainforest of Papua New Guinea, and when we lived in the bedroom community of Santa Maria, CA.  We’ve gone long enough buying eggs from the grocery store, the health food store, or the farmer’s market.  It was time.  It was time to reclaim our heritage as farmers.  It was time to restore our ‘rep’ as returned Peace Corps volunteers.

Also, we kept driving past Tractor Supply Corporation (who did not receive any remuneration from this product placement mention), and it is “Chick Days” all the way through Easter.  In my defense, I survived SEVERAL trips to TSC (my favorite store) without buying any chicks or ducklings.  But enough is enough – once Angie is on board, the tide is comin’ in! And there is no two ways about it.

We now share our laundry room with 3 baby Rhode Island Reds and 2 baby Barred Rocks.  We bought a tin washtub, put pine (never cedar; the fumes will kill them)  shavings in the bottom, 3 inches deep (should have been over newspaper, but I didn’t read the directions that carefully), along with a feeder, a waterer, and a heat lamp (TSC recommends a red bulb – not white) (I’m sure it didn’t have anything to do with the white bulbs being half the price of the red bulbs).

As soon as I master the art of photo addition to this blog, you too can see them! Yes, we will share and chronicle the lives of our 5 little pullets.  We’ve named three of them, or at least the kids have.

Stay tuned for names and faces!