First, Lucy, the black copper marans, saw her replacement (more on THAT later) because we had all of the chicks outside in our time out coop, and started laying again. Same big, beautiful eggs, 3-4 a week. Because of that, there's been a few times when I've gotten an egg from all seven hens in one day!
Second, much as I hated to admit it, Foster/Sue seemed to have a much redder and more developed comb than I thought a pullet ought to have. Sadly enough, he started crowing, and is most definitely a rooster. He was kind of picking on a rooster my neighbor had, and she got fed up with it, and kicked him out. We put him in the time out coop, and she kept her chickens in her back yard.
Here's a video of him crowing from a month or so ago:
And here's a picture of him taken just a few days ago. I think he seems to have grown into a very handsome boy. His crowing has improved, but I haven't taken video of it recently.
We are in the process of making the chicken run about 3x as big as it was before. We did most of the work today, we just need to get some more chicken wire to complete the project.
Once that's done, we'll probably have Sue join the girls. As it is now, he's still separated from them because he hasn't quite asserted his dominance yet. He did manage to, um, not be a virgin anymore. That was awesome- we had our friends and their six children over when that happened. However, there's still a couple hens picking on him. He is bigger than all of them now, and that really helps. In the beginning when he was smaller, he just ran away like a big old chicke... well. Yeah. Anyway, we'd been calling him Foster up to that point. But, we decided to go back to Sue, following Johnny Cash's philosophy in "A Boy Named Sue".
I think he was shocked because his nestmates adored him. They followed him everywhere, and he basked in their admiration.
They still remember him, and recently when he was free ranging, the saw him on the other side of the fence and went running over to visit. It was funny.
No comments:
Post a Comment