One by one

Chick #1 has a sibling. 

This one looks just like broody Whitney.  

Mid-hatch.

Minutes after hatching yesterday afternoon.

 This morning.

Pocket pet

Day 33 success!

Our newest flock addition. :)

Dad is an Ameraucana. 

Egg Mom was a green-egg laying Ameraucana. 

Brood Mom is a Tetra Tint. 

Baby is homegrown.

Sixteen more to go?

Do I have to talk to the lady with the camera?

I'd really not rather talk to the lady with the camera.

Tell her I'm not home. 

Evolution 101

I'm pretty sure the number one rule of motherhood is don't eat the baby. Whitney, hen of broodiness, didn't get the memo. Sigh. Her parenting strategy so far? Sit lightly on eggs, keep eggs warm, turn eggs regularly, cluck softly to eggs, and finally, if hungry, eat eggs.

Yesterday was day 24 of Whitney's incubation stint. On day 21, the hypothetical hatch day for the original eggs, I checked the clutch up close. There were 15 eggs in the nest. Only seven had the markings I had made two weeks ago (out of about 12 originally marked). Nine of the 15 eggs were blue or green. Whitney lays brown eggs. On day 21 I also threw out all the unclaimed eggs in neighboring boxes, including several that had my original marking, but that had then been moved and abandoned on subsequent days. The day came and went with no chicks. Yesterday, day 24, Whitney had 16 eggs in her nest, only three of which had the markings I made on day eight and 11 of which were blue or green. The Ameraucanas continue to push Whitney off the nest when they want to use it.

The continued shuffling of eggs was making me nervous. Each day I am a little less confident that the eggs I bring inside are freshly laid and chickless. I decided to intervene.

I made a new nest for Whitney in a cat litter box inside a dog crate. I filled it with clean shavings, some fresh water and food, then carefully pulled the eggs out from under her and placed them in the box. I threw in two new eggs from another nest for good measure and finally lifted Whitney out of her nest, into the box and carried the whole thing into the barn. Holding my breath.

No go. The move woke her from her trance and she became visibly agitated, the way they do when they get separated from their flock. Fine. I moved the whole crate back out to the pen and placed it so she could see her friends. They crowded around and agitated some more. She still failed to settle. Instead she perched on the edge of the litter box and looked anxious.

I left her like that and went to clean out the coop. I hoped she'd resume her duties. A few minutes into cleaning I heard a loud pop. I thought Whitney must have sat down hard on the eggs and broken one. Um, no. She cracked it with her beak. On purpose. Yeah. And then ate it. It was not one of the fresh eggs. It was slightly rotten. Yuck. Pretty sure it had a bit of chickstuff in it too.

My first instinct was to throw the guilty party back in the pen with the rest of the hens and dump the whole lot of eggs. Curiosity got the better of me. I decided to wait and see what she did next. She had plenty of eggs. She could eat some and hatch some and probably still have a couple left over. She finished the first egg, but still wouldn't settle down.

After an hour or so of watching her pace around in the crate with no trace of broodiness left, I  gave up and decided to let her out to rejoin her friends. I opened her door expecting her to head out into the pen. Instead, she hightailed it straight to the coop and the now empty nest. In she crawled. Ugh. Apparently evolution told her to stick with the nest, not the eggs.

Maybe that strategy works in the wild, but in the barnyard, it's a bit of a problem.

In the end, I nailed an old screen across the front of her nest inside the small coop. At least it will keep the other hens and the rooster from harassing her, pushing her off the nest, or stealing the eggs.


I put food and water in with her. Maybe she'll be content to eat the food and not the eggs. Maybe not. I'll give her a couple of days. If she stays broody and eats and drinks what I provide, I'll let her sit it out another three weeks.

I had no idea having a broody hen was so tricky.


                                                                             

Will they or won't they?

Nineteen evenings ago, or thereabouts, I went to close up the chicken coop like I have every evening for the past year and half. Just outside the coop, I startled a raccoon, who ran off around the garage.  I peaked inside the little shed to count the tails crowded together on the roost, as I always do. Dusk was past and dark was looming so it was a little hard to tell where one hen stopped and the next started on the crowded roost, but I was pretty sure I was one hen short.

Finally I spied, down in the farthest nest box, next to the small chicken door, the protruding tail of one white hen. None of my hens have ever slept in a nest box, so this concerned me. It was Whitney (as in the mountain, not the singer). She was far enough into the shed that I couldn't reach her without crawling over the sleepers on the roost, so I poked at her a bit with a long stick. Nothing. I thought either she'd already descended into her nighttime coma, or she was dead, our first raccoon victim. I decided to hope for coma and come back in the morning. So, I was surprised to find this the next morning. Not so much a coma as a stupor. A broody stupor.

Whitney is some sort of Leghorn cross, bred for production. I was led to believe that this breed rarely goes broody. Nonetheless there she sat, fluffed up, glassy-eyed, and clucking softly to a large clutch of eggs. And so she's remained for nearly three weeks now. As incubation goes it seems a long comedy of errors to me, unlikely to produce any chicks. The number of eggs under her seemed to vary at first, sometimes more, sometimes less. I couldn't figure it out until a more experienced friend told me to mark the existing eggs. Theoretically, this would help me know when to call time on the whole process and avoid letting Whitney spend the whole summer waiting for eggs to hatch. I did catch Diablo and Shasta (more mountains) adding new eggs to the nest a couple of times when Whitney took her midday breaks. But more strangely, once the original eggs were marked so that I could recognize them, I started finding them in neighboring boxes. I never have seen the deeds that led to this arrangement. Maybe Whitney rejected them and another hen claimed them. Maybe some hens flat out stole them for themselves. No idea. I've tried to remove any new eggs laid since the marking, but I haven't taken the rejected eggs. I'm not sure what to do with them. I don't know how long they were incubated or how developed they were before they were cast out.


I also am not sure how many eggs remain under Whitney.

What I do know is that day 21 is coming up and I will be on the look out for chicks.

Hard day to be a bird

I was going to get an updated picture of the baby robins this morning for Wild Bird Wednesday.

But this time they really are gone. Here's the empty nest. Sometime between Monday afternoon and this morning (Wednesday), a predator got them. Mom went down fighting. I'll spare you the pictures that prove that.

I can't say who did it. I suspect raccoons. Batman, the feral cat, would also be a good candidate except that he is injured at the moment with a gimpy back leg and I can't see him climbing up to get them.


The exact same thing happened to another nest last spring in the mower shed. I was so hoping these guys would fare better. I put up not one, but two security lights, including those creepy blinking red ones on the outside of the shed. I probably should have put one inside the shed as well.

The mourning dove eggs are also gone.

 

Birdbrain

Um...birdbrain...that would be me. Where is my fact checker?

A fact checker would have seen this lovely, hardworking, worm-bearing mama robin.
















Yep, that's right, the baby robins are alive and well.  They are just very, very quiet.

!

Bird update

I'm afraid the little robins didn't make it. It wasn't a predator. Mom just didn't know what she was doing. That's my best guess. I hope my presence wasn't an influence. :(

I did see Mom sitting on the nestlings the first couple of days -- like they were still eggs. But I never saw either her or Dad bringing food to the nest. I never once heard the babies peeping. I think they just died. Mom and Dad are still around, so I'm hoping they try again -- but somewhere safer than by the open shed door.

As for the mourning doves, there is still hope, but I won't be following them.

After I discovered their nest and eggs, I looked up info on doves. It warned that doves are easily spooked into abandoning their nests, eggs, and even nestlings. So, I haven't gone back to peek in on them. I can see the location of the nest from the house, but it's so well buried in the vines that I can't see the nest or bird itself. Oh well, maybe I'll be able to tell what happens from a distance.

Right around the house we also have several pairs of cardinals, chipping sparrows (I think), and blue jays, as well as several other pairs of robins. It's a busy spring!

Meanwhile, behind the old milk house....

...a mourning dove nest.

Nekkid birds

Brand new baby robins.

Awfully hard to get a picture with angry mama dive bombing my head. ;)

The robins' story started here, and continued here, here, and here. By my count, mama started sitting on the nest last Thursday or Friday, which would make today incubation day 11 or 12.  Now the babies have another 14 or so days before they will fledge. Their big challenge will be to survive the raccoons and Batman. Batman especially is a pretty constant presence these days. I caught him in the shed just yesterday, but I can't tell if he's aware of the nest or not.

Fingers crossed for the little songbirds.















Linking to WBW

One more makes four

Three and counting

I love birds