Lightning strikes again

Wow, did I get lucky again! Hard to believe I have such good fortune.

We went to Richland Center for the Badger Poultry Club show last year and had to great honor of winning the Chantys first "best in show" with a white bantam cock. I had purchased him about 3 years ago and he is my "old man", the foundation of my flock. It's just AWESOME, knowing that the birds I am breeding are coming from good parents. But I had not actually hatched him. He was somebody else's breeding.

The family went back over the weekend to the same show. We took 5 birds, 2 Brahmas and 3 Chanteclers. All hens and cocks seeing as our young stock is gone.  All the Chants are bred by me. And well..........

Ethan, a 3rd generation cock won a reserve Best in Show! The Chants hit big twice in 2 years, talk about lightning striking twice. I am thrilled beyond words over this one. I bred this bird, yeah! I am doing SOMETHING RIGHT! Of course Ethan is too, he put on quite the show. He danced and preened and convinced everybody he was the man. 

On the baby front, I have 5 chicks out from Buck. Its a start but I would like to get about 30 altogether. 15 from Buck and 15 from Ethan. I have lots of fertiles in the incubator. Yeah! Even about 10 Brahmas, so Mikes birds will be saved also. I will have 15 chicks for sure from Bucks ladies and I have about 5 fertiles from Ethans girls. They are older, so they are laying a bit less. But I will get there!

So here are my handsome boys: The first one is Ethan, and the second is Buck, the older one.

Slowly starting up again

I am coming out of my funk just a little bit. Its hard to be depressed for too long. I don't know how some people do it. It's spring, that just gets me going, everything is so ALIVE and GROWING, how can that not perk you up, right?

I started in again on the coat! YEAH!! I am not going to do anything else until it is done. I have to. If I don't, I will put it aside "for a while" and it will gather dust for the next 10 years. This is how I am. So I sewed the cuffs onto the sleeves yesterday. I know, not much, but a little bit every week now and I will be done by the time I need to wear it. If it rains, I could actually finish them and set them in the coat. Ambitious, I know..... but there could be a downpour of biblical proportions. I'm going to need that kind of time to set them in!

And finally, I got some chicks hatched! YEAH! Four, as of this morning. Hopefully two more when I get home. All Chanteclers, the Brahmas aren't laying yet. So I start the year again. I'll have young birds to carry over the winter, but thats OK. At least they will be alive.

Oh yeah, put the garden in over the weekend. Should be buried in produce by the end of July. ANOTHER YEAH!

See you soon, hopefully with pictures, still haven't taken any yet.

Not too much going on....

Haven't been writing as there is not too much going on lately. I suppose, it being spring, that I should be hopping. I am busy, but not working on the things that I write about on this blog.

The garden is full of weeds. I haven't put anything in the ground in two weeks. 

I haven't touched my coat in the same amount of time. I need start the sleeves and can't bring myself to start. I will never have it done by the time State Fair, I know this now.

There are only 16 chickens left at the house. It is so lonely without any young ones around. I have 8 in the incubator with a week left to go. They may hatch, but the temperature has been very erratic, I hope they hatch. I need a new incubator, but they are expensive.

What have I been doing? Working on house repairs, and moping around. Repaired the floor under the toilet after we discovered it had been leaking for years. Fixing the bathtub faucet. Working on the kitchen sink also. Fixing the waterline for the icemaker. TRYING to find a new job. Short hours, paycuts and temporary layoffs at mine and my husbands jobs are taking their toll. We're broke. I'm scared. If my job goes away, it will be hard to replace. I work in a dying industry and people who do what I do are not in short supply.

I may end up in retail again and working until I die. 

Yeah I'm depressed today, can you tell? Maybe tomorrow will be better, you never know. 

Right?

All gone............

They are all gone.

All of the chicks my son and I hatched out this year. All gone. In one day. Because we were stupid. 

We trusted our dog. Fatal mistake for the poor birds. The dog house was undergoing some revisions to the door and we had to put them somewhere. Our large coop was empty and the dogs were to stay in there for the day. My husband wanted them to go outside though. He reinforced the fencing between the birds and the dogs. There was even an empty pen between the dogs and the chickens. All to no avail, however. Dog went through two fences and killed every single one. Puppy followed him and helped.

My heart aches with the guilt, I knew better than this. Given the opportunity, any animal will behave according to his instincts and breeding. Given the chance, a bird dog will chase birds. That is what they do. They don't differentiate between a chicken and a pheasant or a goose when you are not around to remind them.  All dogs are predators, they kill other animals for food. That is just what they do.

Please if you have chickens, learn from my mistake. Your own dog(or you neighbors) will be your worst predator.

Just give them the chance.

Time to meet the crew

I thought it was about time for the gang to be introduced to the world. I realized that I had been talking about my birds as far as breeding them without bothering to introduce them as individual birds. I do have birds I retain for breeding, but that doesn't mean that's all there is to my chicken-keeping. So without further ado, here we go:

This is Jake, my son's backup rooster. He's handsome, but has to take a back seat to his brother this year!

This is Elroy, my son's top rooster and 85 and 88. This guy is has the ladies this year, lucky roo. For some unknown reason, the girls rarely get names at my house. Maybe because there are so many more of them? I don't know for sure. The numbers come from their legbands. In order to show, birds have to be banded and it is an easy way to keep track of birds that are very similar to each other. The green spiral legband on Elroys leg doesn't have a number. I just use spirals to keep track of good birds when they are growing up. Green is a keeper, yellow, a one to watch, and a red is to be sold.

Here are the our family's special birds. These ones are the charmers in the barnyard. From left to right: Mr. Moto, a Japanese. He is our pet rooster. Girler is a Millie Fleur, Belgian Bearded D'Uccle (what a mouthful!). Brahma girl is Mike's first big winner, a reserve best in show. Last is Double D, a reserve best in show at the State Fair, and an excellent hen to boot. 

Here are some of my birds, Ethan, 34 and 39. They are all year olds, full brother and sisters. I'll be hatching and showing these 3 this year. I still have to match up the girls with my older rooster and Ethan with the older hens.
Here are 127 and 65. They are the older Chantecler hens Ethan will be matched to later this year. Proud girls aren't they?
This is the the oldest Chantecler rooster, Buck. He has a lifetime pass at the house also. A good looking bird and a gentleman also.

And finally the babies!!! If you look back on the first post I made, you would see them as week old chicks in January. Look at them now, they got big fast! There is nothing I enjoy more than feeding the young ones and watching them develop. It's the best part of having birds, the time you take just to WATCH them. They are fascinating critters. 
Now you've met them all........... at least until I hatch more!

Meet the girls

Thought I would introduce my girls to the world. I have posted in the past about my Chantecler roosters and I thought it was time to let the ladies shine a little. Heres one:

The girls are very gentle. They are not flighty or unfriendly birds as a whole. If anything, they are timid and shy, not aloof. They are not hard to chase down and catch, they just give up and crouch after a while. I am not a good chicken-catcher, it doesn't take much to get away from me. So of course I like my ladies, they not too much for me to handle. 

They don't show as well as the boys, due to their shyness. You need a feistier bird to show off for the judge. I have had some success with the bolder ones, don't get me wrong. I received a reserve AOCCL at poultry show last fall on a pullet. In fact she is the lady pictured here today. The boys do better though :(.  (I hate it when that happens!) I have a little more work to do with these girls, but they are coming along. I need a more upright tail carriage; 30 degrees from horizontal is ideal. Also, a little better tail spread would be nice.  The good news is the younger ones look better than my older stock. I am slowly making progress. 

I'll have to take pictures now that the snow is off the ground (these are older photos) and everybody gets to go outside. They are so HAPPY now. Even the older guys and girls were flying and bouncing off the fencing. I love springtime!

Just holding my breath........

Sunday was just an awful day here. Weather-wise, I mean. March is such a changeable month here in Wisconsin. You can go from zero to 60 within 24 hours. And back again unfortunately. 

My flock had been enjoying the mild weather for days last week after being cooped up (chicken joke!) all winter. I had the bright idea to build their pens at the bottom of a slope, so they did have to deal with the run off from the melting snow as the ground was still frozen, but it didn't seem to bother them. Anything to be outside! Then the weekend arrived.

Nothing but rain on Saturday. Lots of it to add to the run-off problem. The pens are now standing in water at their ends. I can live with this as they are very large. Then Sunday came. First rain, then ice, then sleet, then snow. It was a meteorological smorgasbord. Still not a problem except for all the dead elm trees in my back yard. I forgot to look up when installing all the chicken fencing. Otherwise I would have seen them all, right?  It was raining branches on the netting I put over the pens to keep the hawks out, the fence is sagging and bending from the stress. You can see that below beyond the coop on the left:

I don''t know if any trees came down. I am into my work week now and haven't looked for myself. My son says its all fine. I'm not sure though, sometimes he looks but he doesn't see. Do you know what I mean? Today, we have had sustained 50 mph winds. Perhaps the trees, already weakened, are down now? I'll find out tonight. My husband will take down the trees this spring, its time for him to do that now. Well, actually that would have been last year..........

Heir to the throne....

The reigning king in my barnyard, Buck, is now probably 4 years old. I bought him as a cockerel and he and his ladies have reigned in the barnyard ever since. They have their own special coop and the nicest, shaded, pen. His sons and grandsons could not come close to his type and attitude and were gotten rid of at the end of the year. I would keep one of them as a backup rooster and then get rid of him when the new hatch came along. They were just not up to par. That however, has quietly changed.

Last year I had picked out my new backup rooster from that years hatch. I took him to a show last fall, and he turned out to have "roachback". This is where the one of the back legs is actually set ahead of the other on the spine, so that the tail twists sideways and bird kind of "sidewinds" when he walks. A disqualification in any show and in the breeding pen. He was disposed of and I kept the only one I had left at that point as the back up cockerel. Then this happened:

My last batch of chicks hatched last year, the ones that were the most ignored, had the most losses due to predation was hiding a gem! The last cockerel hatched, the runt of litter, the one that I ignored, has quietly come on to be worthy candidate to replace his Dad. In my humble opinion, of course. Do you think I like him or what? I am just happy he was not of his hatchmates that I lost to the cat, the cold, or the raccoon. I have gotten very lucky with him. He has the type (I think) and a very nice attitude. He's "cocky" but does not attack. That I will not tolerate. Here's a side shot:

And a shot of his head. I am pleased with the comb and wattles. They are very small and tidy. Can you see why you would want these birds if you live in a cold climate? It is no fun to watch a bird suffer from frozen combs and wattles, the most vulnerable parts of their bodies in the winter. This breed will suffer less heat loss and be more comfortable in harsh conditions.

I have 3 chicks of his on the ground and will be mating him back to his mothers and grandmothers pens come late March. Wish him luck!

Bantam Light Brahmas

Today seems  a good day to think about Brahmas. So I was doing just that. Thought I would introduce everybody to them.

Brahmas are a very old breed originating from what is now India. I am not going to bore anyone with a history penned by me, instead please read this article.  It is from a wonderful website, Backyard Poultry,  and is much better written than anything I could do.   

My son has the bantam version of these, the males weigh @ about 2 pounds and the females slightly less. They are lights, which means they are a columbian color pattern, or IOWs, white chickens with black in the hackles, wings and tail. Important features of a good bird are: 

1. A good broad skull, with eyebrows projecting over eyes, making them seem deep set. They seem to look perpetually "worried" to me. 

2. Undercolor of the body feathers should be slate colored, the darker the better. This refers to the "fluff" part of the feather, which is just what it sounds like, the fluffy stuff closest to the bottom of the feather. The dark should not extend into the "web" or top part of the feather everyone sees.

3. Feathers should extend all the way down the legs to the tips of the two outer toes. They should be soft feathers, no stiff shafts on them.

4.  Penciling, or the coloring of black on white (or vice versa) should be as fine and even as possible.

5. They have a "pea comb" and abundant feathering, making them very hardy. A pea comb is basically a jelly bean shaped comb with 3 parallel rows of bumps running down it. 

There's more, of course, but I think I have hit a few of the main points. If you would like to keep chickens this would be a good breed to start with. They are hardy, cold tolerant birds that lay well and are meaty bird when butchering time comes. They are very gentle in general, even the largest, so are good for families with children. Here is one photo of my son and his pullet (female under 1 year). He was fortunate enough to win top prize, a "best in show" at the Wisconsin State Fair. Against adults too, mind you! 

OK, that was the official nice picture. Here is the one Mom likes:



Just don't tell him, OK?

A little bit about Chanteclers

Have some time this morning, so I thought I would tell you a little bit about the chickens I own.  I have only one breed I am working with, the bantam White Chantecler. A bantam is a smaller size (1/4-1/3) the size of a standard breed. White, obviously, refers to the color pattern, a solid white. And Chantecler is the name of the breed. 

The Chantecler is a fairly new breed, a composite one actually, bred in the 1900s by a Trappist monk in Canada. He was looking for a hardy, all purpose farm stock that could endure the cold Canadian winters. It has Plymouth Rock, Wyandotte, Leghorn, Rhode Island Red and Cornish in it's blood. Check out this site if you're interested in learning more, les oiseaux.  Its in french, so you'll have to run it through Google Translate. Very interesting and thorough with lots of good birds pictured. Translation is not entirely accurate, but humorous. 

Breed is characterized by a very small comb, called a "cushion" and small or non-existent wattles. They have abundant feathering that leans toward being hard feathered, given the Cornish in its blood. They are active, proud birds, with a good amount of breast meat and they lay well. You should be able to see a hint of the Leghorn in it's demeanor and stature. They are officially considered a critically endangered breed by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.

Without any further ado, here is the main man in the coop:

This is one good looking bird, trust me. His name is Buck. He won a "Best in Show" at the poultry show in Richland Center, Wisconsin in 2008. A very hard thing to do to begin with, much less with a rare breed like the Chantecler. It is a matter of good breeding, good luck, good timing, and a judge who is familiar how your rare breed should look. It may never happen again to me. He is part of a trio I was lucky enough to acquire a few years ago. I am still using him, but will soon be passing the honors on to a great grandson who I think will be better than him. This summer should tell. I'll get a picture of him up soon. 

Buck will be retired soon, but to pet status. Doesn't happen much with chickens, much less a rooster, at my house. Otherwise, you're soon overrun with "pets", and no room for the breeding stock coming up. This guy is special, however and gets a place of honor in the coop. The only other pet rooster we have is Mr. Moto and he is pictured in the sink on the right hand side of this blog. Take a look.

That's it for now............more on the Chanteclers soon!

New chicks

Just a quick picture of my basement. Yes they are living in my basement! Only safe place for a chick to be this time of year. I tell folks they are just like any other animal you keep in the house, if you don't keep them clean, they'll smell. My chickens don't smell. We hatched some out this early in order to have mature birds for the county fair at the end of July and the early fall shows. There is a national show in Illinois in early September that my son and I are gunning for this year. The yellow chicks are bantam white Chanteclers and the greyish ones are bantam Light Brahmas.  More on the breeds later........