Week One for the Babies!

A week has went by so fast and so much has happened here at the Coop DeVille farm!  Out of the 16 eggs that Lucy and Ethel were sitting on they successfully hatched out 13.  I am very pleased with that result.  Sadly, we have lost two of them, one to an accident and the other probably to a cat or a bigger bird like a hawk.  Only Mother Nature knows.  I have been doing this long enough to know that it is truly a wild world and it is all about survival of the fittest. 

So currently, Lucy has 4 babies and Ethel has the other 7.  By Wednesday they were taking them out of the crates and by Friday they had them outside in the chicken yard.  It is so cute to watch them teaching them to eat and drink, take a dust bath and how to socialize with the others in the flock.  At this point most of the others could care less about the babies.  The mommas are doing a good job of protecting them and keeping them warm and safe.  

Speaking of keeping warm, do you know that the babies will crawl under momma and up into her wings, between here legs....where ever they need to be to get warm?  They will also get on the back of the momma and attempt to hitch a ride or just take a nap.  So yesterday the wind was horribly here, even for Wyoming standards.  Sustained winds of 40-45 with gusts over 60.  Those little babies were getting blown all over that hen yard.  But the mommas were doing a good job of keeping them close and warm.  Around 5pm I heard a strange noise...it sounded like hail coming down the stove pipe.  I got up to see if it was raining and to my amazement it was a complete white out.  A blizzard came out of no where...my first thought was the babies!  Luckily, my son was home and we threw on coats and ran to the hen yard.  Sure enough there were Lucy and Ethel, hunkered down, covered with snow.  The snow was coming down so fast and the wind was driving so hard it was sticking to the sides of the coop and fence.  The look of relief when they saw us come through the gate was incredible.  I know chickens don't have much in the way of facial expression, but I know my girls and I could see the relief.  We quickly got them all scooped up and into the coop out of the snow and wind. By the time Alex and I got back up to the house, we looked like some kind of snow monsters.  The snow had stuck to us, our hair was soaking wet and plastered down to our faces.  We were quite a sight I am sure...sadly, this was done in such a rush I didn't even stop to consider taking pictures.  I just wanted to get those babies out of the snow. 

 So I am sure you are wondering why they didn't just head into the coop in the first place when the weather started to change.  Well those little babies can come down the ramps to the coops quite easily but going back up is another.  It will be another week or so before they all can run right up those ramps on their own. I have been helping them every evening since the mommas started bringing them outside.  It is just part of having them.  

In other fun news, both of my incubators are running.  Currently, I have 18 Silkie/Showgirl eggs in the smaller one, 33 in the other incubator.  Those are a combination of Silkie/Sizzle eggs and some more mixed breed from my flock.  The ones in the larger incubator will be hatching on the Saturday before Easter and the others will hatch a few days later. The Silkie/Sizzle eggs came from Washington state via eBay and the others came from Oregon, also won on eBay.  Silkie/Showgirl/Sizzle eggs are notoriously hard to hatch, so I am keeping my fingers crossed for a good hatch rate.