Eggs (week ending 5/21): 45*
Eggs (year to date): 862
Includes 5 Bantie eggs and three broken eggs found in nests

With the able assistance of a mysterious entity known as KK, who was there to soak up chicken ambience (and volunteered [!] to help with the chores) I got everything done last week except finding wood for the chicken tractor and mucking out the front part of the yard. We did one thing that I forgot to put on the list - putting up a new roost in the coop. KK and I put our heads together and I ended up cutting a suitable branch off the stripped and dying willow in the barnyard. KK is brilliant at working with found objects, and using an ancient, rusted bucket handle and another piece off of the same tree, created an arty means of mounting the new perch..

I didn't think it would see use right away as we hung it in the nursery area of the coop. When the Class of 2005 (as I have dubbed this batch of chicks, in honor of the 4th graders who hatched them) get introduced to the rest of the coop, I'll take down the barrier and fence to expand the coop once more. I didn't think the chicks would find their way up to the new perch, but it wasn't 24 hours before one brave little white leghorn found its way up there. They're dumb birds, but not that dumb.

During the week I also took the plastic nest box I had abandoned earlier and recovered it, using duct tape this time. I put it back in the coop, but so far no nibbles on usage from the chooks. I think I need to make the entrance a little bit bigger. As it is, they still tend to lay in the one little corner next to where I keep the water and oyster shell. Keeping them locked up has encouraged the laying - I got 9 eggs a couple of days as a result of this - but now the goofy things have virtually abandoned using the hanging nest boxes.

Maybe they are that dumb.

Eggs (week ending 5/14): 45*
Eggs (year to date): 817
*includes 6 Bantie eggs

I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier. I was e-mailing a friend who had asked me about the fate of the hidden clutch of eggs I found (they're now cat eggs), and by way of explaining why I don't compost them into the manure pile (I don't want the chickens to find them and get a taste for them), I told how they acted like little gardening tools, keeping the pile stirred up for me.

Then it hit me. I could actually encourage them to more of that by sprinkling their ration of scratch into the pile. What fun for them, what a time saver for me. I feel like I'm starting to get more efficient at running things here, so I might actually be up to speed after a while.

Meantime, here's a preview of what I need to accomplish this weekend (besides the usual chores). I'm doing this for me, because I jotted my To Do list on a scrap of cardboard while wandering the barnyard last night - and I tend to lose things like that:

• It's fill-up day in the coop - meaning I need to fill up the containers of stuff that doesn't get used up quickly (Dry Stall and Crushed Oyster Shell) that I keep up high in storage.


• The barn swallows are starting to build condos in the goat stables and in the overhang again. Time to start knocking them down. (They're allowed to build elsewhere in the barn, but not around the animals.)


• Find a suitable place for, and hang up, the Rain Gauge I impulsively bought at Tractor Supply (they were right next to the Rooster Thermometer that I bought and put up last night). If suitable place cannot be found, take it back.


• Remove the scur on Lewis's head. (A scur is a flat, horn-like projection that grows on a goat's head if they have not been disbudded (had their horns removed) properly. Both Lewis and Clark have recurring scurs, but I got Clark's off last night when he got his head stuck through a gate. Sensing an opportunity, I pulled the scur before I let him loose.)


• Start collecting lumber for the chicken tractor. I've been scouting it out for the last few days. Time to draw some plans and make a pile.


• Start mucking out the outside of the barnyard. (The stalls are my daughter's problem.)


• Get a plastic container for the black oil sunflower seeds I bought for the goats. They're sitting in a tack room in their big, difficult-to-open sack. But rodents have sharp, pointy teeth. (I may do this on my lunch hour today.)

Finding the White Rock in hiding, leaving her in hiding, and watching her back feathers grow back in is what made me decide to build a chicken tractor first. Not only will I use it to raise the massively excreting meat birds, but I can also use it as a respite housing for sexually abused hens, giving them a chance to rest and grow their feathers back and lay eggs in nice surroundings without having to worry about opportunistic roosters.

I thought about going the PVC pipe route, but it's better all the way around, I think, if I use scrap lumber, which is plentiful around the barn. There's that whole recycling thing, plus this lumber is heavy. I want something that winds can't shift and predators can't tip. Time to start sketching. WIth this new site design, I may even take in-progress pics and post them. I'm also planning a new Chicken Genetics page based on what I've seen in this batch of chicks.

More fun ahead.

Welcome to the new look of the chicken blog.

And check out the numbers in the headline. On the right, the maximum number of possible points we could make on our project in HTML class. On the left, the number of points I got on mine.

That's not a typo. Our instructor told us that we could get 180 points for meeting minimum requirements, with 200 as the top end. But then he said that in the past he had given as many as 225 points for sites that really went the extra mile. I told myself right then that I was going to get more than 200 points.

So here's the redesign. The only caveat here is that I do not consider myself to be much in the way of a graphic designer. While design and consistency were a part of the grade, a lot of it was for proper use of HTML and CSS.

Next up - a CSS-based redesign of my main site, complete with proper HTML coding (what you see now is based on what I taught myself by looking at other people's code - I didn't know about things like nesting and self-closing tags and all of that, so the HTML is a wretched mess).

In chicken news, I found the two runaways that were to have been culled. One was hiding during the day, then would come in and hide in a nest box at night. The other was in a far corner of the barn, where it has been hiding out and regrowing feathers. I also found a bonus - the secret cache where the hens have been laying. There were eight eggs there.

So now to keep them locked up in the morning and early afternoon until they get the hang of laying in the coop again.

The Farmer is moving on to greener pastures! I'm transferring the blog off of Blogspot and onto my server. Look for more changes coming soon. Meantime, you can keep up on the chickening and goating adventures at:

joecliffordfaust.com/chickens

See you there...

By way of the Backyard Chickens message boards, here's a great new chicken resource: Henderson's Chicken Breed Chart.

It contains lots of useful information on 70 breeds of chicken, including personality, egg size, color and production, and if they're good winter layers.

A permanent link will appear in the sidebar when I upload the redesigned site. I'm just waiting to see what my grade is.

Eggs (week ending 4/30): 37
Eggs (week ending 5/7): 31
Eggs (year to date) 772

Egg production continues to decline, but things should be getting better. I spent most of the day Saturday cleaning out the layer section of the coop (the nursery had already been recently cleaned). Yesterday I took the surviving six meat birds away to be processed.

I was also going to take a few culls out - I had three candidates in mind - but I changed my mind about one of them, and oddly enough, the other two that were going to be removed disappeared over the weekend. Now that's really odd. I am reminded of Chicken Run... part of me wants to think that they got word and escaped. The practical part of me says that I need to walk around the farm and see if I can find the remains of scattered piles of feathers.

On the other hand, production did pick up a little bit. On Saturday one of the Silkie/Cochin crosses laid its first egg - and as of yesterday I have three little banty eggs in the fridge along with the more traditional sizes. I also had some suspicions confirmed about one of the three S/C cross hens - it's a rooster. I was wondering about it because the comb on the top of the head, hidden in all those black feathers, seemed bigger than what was on the other two hens. On Saturday in the middle of pitchforking manure, I heard a crow that I thought was Handsome... but it turned out to be the black cross. In the days that followed, it has tried to jump some of the S/C hens, without much success. This one might be a cull, or it might get another home. We'll see.

There's also more good eating ahead. In a joke of genetics, of the three surviving Buff Orpington chicks, two are roosters, and of the four Barred Plymouth Rocks, three are roosters. I'm thinking about keeping a roo of each and culling (through adoption or other means) the Rhode Island Reds. Someone in the area is selling started pullets of both breeds, but I'm going to wait and see how this latest batch of chicks turns out.

The table is also where the roosters from the current batch of chicks will end up - but I think the odds are good that I might get some good layers out of the rest. I just hope that I have a good share of the White Leghorns that are actually female.

Meantime, I'll have to keep an eye on the hens. The surviving original Reds should be past the time for molting, but I have yet to see it happen. Maybe I missed it. By the end of summer the second wave of birds - the Red Sex Links, Silver Laced Wyandottes, etc. - should be getting ready to molt, too,. That might account for some of the production drop.

Of course, with two birds now gone walkabout, that would explain why production hasn't recovered yet. But with summer more or less here now, things should pick up. Hopefully.