Friday 21st April 2017
'Tis the season to be broody
In four days we have gone from two broodies to five! The Indian Game pictured is one of the latest, she was born in 2013 and as well as being a very good broody (Indian Games often are), she is also our most viscious and you definitely do not go near her without hands and arms being protected!! Queenie (our wonderful bantam and mum of course to Queenie Baby Pale (QBP)) – see 17th) is also hunkered down in a nest box. This is not at all surprising: most years Queenie raises two if not three broods although one year she did abandon one brood at just four weeks, a little young it has to be said.
Our final 'new' broody is a granddaughter of Queenie, one of the 15 hatched by QPB last autumn and in fact the only one we kept, the rest either being in the freezer (the cockerels) or sold as laying hens. We kept her because she is very pretty, with a beautiful white chest and lovely Indian Game lacing!! The problem we have now though, is that we have no idea where she is. She did not put herself to bed the night before last, only to appear the following morning for food: a classic sign that she had spent the night on a nest and was now wanting to replenish her supplies!! Unfortunately we did not manage to see where she then disappeared to and no amount of searching the barn, hedgerows, woodsheds etc located her. And today, we have not seen her at all!! We very much hope she has not fallen foul of a predator but do wonder whether we will see her again. Maybe in three weeks she will appear with her brood... stranger things have happened!!
We have spent some time thinking through our hatching plans for this year. As well as wanting to hatch another Indian Game cockerel (as explained on Monday), we are also keen to get some different coloured eggs into our egg boxes (egg sales are on the cards at some stage) and so we are also looking at buying some fertile hatching eggs for both Marans (layers of very dark brown eggs) and Exchequers (white egg layers). We have ordered some more Indian Games as well as we realised that due to IGs being good broodies, it might be good to have a couple more hens, otherwise when it comes to collecting our ‘own’ IG eggs, we may not have that many!!
And in other news, no real improvement still in Thyme and Sage’s calf was due today: we think she is very close and rather amazingly, she has become very mellow and chilled. Let’s hope she still is by the time the calf arrives!!
We have spent some time thinking through our hatching plans for this year. As well as wanting to hatch another Indian Game cockerel (as explained on Monday), we are also keen to get some different coloured eggs into our egg boxes (egg sales are on the cards at some stage) and so we are also looking at buying some fertile hatching eggs for both Marans (layers of very dark brown eggs) and Exchequers (white egg layers). We have ordered some more Indian Games as well as we realised that due to IGs being good broodies, it might be good to have a couple more hens, otherwise when it comes to collecting our ‘own’ IG eggs, we may not have that many!!
And in other news, no real improvement still in Thyme and Sage’s calf was due today: we think she is very close and rather amazingly, she has become very mellow and chilled. Let’s hope she still is by the time the calf arrives!!