Interestingly enough, they did seem to hatch out around days 22 or 23, instead of 21, but she did an outstanding job with them. She hatched out 11 but we did lose 3 after the move to the nesting box. Unfortunately, the roosting box in our coop is a good 3 feet off the ground. The last time we had a hen hatch in this box, she brought the chicks out and when she went back to the nest, several of them didn’t make it back up the ramp and died that evening when it got too cold. It was heartbreaking.

So, now we move the hens to ground nests in a different coop, where the chicks can easily go to and from the nest. We’ve done this countless times – always at night (so the hen is less prone to vacate the new nest when we put her in) but never in the dead of Winter.

Unfortunately, it appears that 3 were somehow unable to get warm that night and did perish. Not an ideal situation and we’ll probably do some extra “post move” checking the evening we next move a hen in the Winter.

Regardless, we have 8 little bantam chicks running about with “their mama” (really a collection of eggs from the various hens that were laying at the time.)

We ordered Welsummer and Cream Legbar chicks, adding to the genetic diversity of what we have. What’s truly amazing is that we placed this order in mid-January and these things arrived on Feb 6 (pretty much exactly when they promised.) The key here is February! I expected them to ship in late March or later, due to the weather. These little chicks made the trip overnight, when the temps dropped to near freezing at our house, and all arrived seemingly healthy. My daughter says they included a heating pad, which must be the case. I was really amazed with this whole thing.

In the first 72 hours, we have lost two chicks. If we manage to have 13 make it through the first 7 days, I’ll be very happy. All seem strong and healthy now, but you never know.

I’ll definitely be using Meyer again!

Then the wind came… We live in the rolling hills of central Va and our pastures surround our farmhouse on top of a hill. The Fall winds, as we were to discover, were quite strong on top of these hills. After the tractor was blown over the first time, I attached rope to each side and staked it down. But, the wind still proved too strong and still damaged the tractor. Eventually, I moved it to it’s current location, at the bottom of the hill where it is subject to very little wind.

In all of this time, we would get up in the mornings to let the chickens out and go out in the evening to close them up again. Although sort of fun at the start, it became quite the honorous task…especially if we were out in the evening and not due home until late. With the doors open, the coons, oppossums and foxes had free range on our chicken… I needed a way to automate this.

Fortunately (and per usual), someone had already encountered this problem and resolved it with the automatic chicken door opener! After some research, I decided on what appeared to be a good brand and give it a try. I have since tried 2 other brands and will report my findings here, in future posts.

These doors make or break it on the FMH. They require little maintenance and keep the chickens safe from the nightly predators (who I regularly catch on my game cam every night!)

On Tuesday, February 7th, a hawk took the life of our head big chicken rooster, Wyatt. Wyatt was a purebred Wyandotte purchased as an egg and hatched out by us in an incubator, so he lived his entire life with us. He ended up getting chosen to be our new rooster and enjoyed free range life with 12 hens. We choose Wyatt because of his calm demeanor and protectiveness of the flock. He was truly the dream rooster! Wyatt died bravely defending a hen from a big hawk. Thankfully, we had just chosen one of his sons, Carter, to be our backup rooster in case something like this happened….. thank the lord we did or we would be without a rooster right now. However, Wyatt was so amazing that we want more chicks from him, so we recently put in 23 eggs(fathered by Wyatt) and 18 Bantam eggs in the incubator. They should hatch in early March.
We hope to get at least 8 hens that we can keep for our own flock while also selling a lot of chicks for other breeders looking for some stunning hens or/and roosters. Wyatt’s Legacy will continue to live on by his offspring. RIP Wyatt!

For whatever reason, I almost always prefer to incubate my fowl, as opposed to buying chicks or ducklings or what-have-you. I like the idea of being responsible for as much of the process as I can, plus I think it’s a good learning opportunity for my daughter. So, we collected eggs from my pop’s farm, from my wife’s brother’s farm and from a couple on a small homestead nearby. We went about incubating them and ended up with 11 chickens – 3 roosters and 8 hens.

The roosters began pestering the gals and this did not set well with my 8 year old. So, we harvested two of the roosters. I am not sure that our execution of this process was successful. For one, my daughter refused to eat the delicious dish with one of the roosters that we harvested. For another, we probably harvested a bit too early. The rooster that was allowed to remain with the flock began attacking both my wife and daughter whenever they came around. “Attacking” is a strong word for it, but he was definitely human aggressive.

I should have done a better job of introducing my daughter to the idea of eating our own birds. I also should have let the roosters get a bit older before deciding who to cull. These were more like what folks call cockerals. A bit more maturity may have given them more time to show us who had the best temperament.

Either way, it was a lesson-learned. These were our pioneer chickens – Puffy Cheeks, Puffy Cheeks Jr, Sue Sue, Tre Tre, Goldilocks, Hot Cocoa, Butterscotch, and xxxxxx. They made it through the move and onto the farm.