I started keeping chickens about a year and a half ago. A friend sent us a hen sitting on nine eggs. Seven hatched (16-17 May 2011); three were roosters. Today the mom-hen and one rooster are at the friend's house again, and the other two roos have been rehomed to a farm (it's more of a very large backyard) not too far away. This leaves me with the four hens who hatched from their eggs:
Swan
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| Swan as chick |
As you can see (hopefully) in the picture, Swan has yellow-white feathers, a yellow beak, yellow feet, and light amber eyes. She's about the length of a pigeon.
Swan is the alpha hen. She is very feathery and does not have feet feathers. She is most certainly
not a cuddler. She likes to peck the other hens to continually and needlessly enforce her top-hen position. She sometimes will "spur" threatening objects, except without the spurs. Swan can fly very well for a chicken, but not as well as the other hens because she is the biggest and heaviest. She very occasionally misses the top of the 6' fence when she launches herself upward from the ground. Swan has gone broody quite a few times, but nowhere near as much as some of the others. She is very particular about where (and if!) she should lay her eggs and will use her beak to hook the Ping-Pong ball decoy eggs into her nest. Swan lays pinkish eggs (no pigment), and her first egg was a double-yolker. Swan eats feathers when she's bored and if they look particularly tasty. She can't really be considered any certain breed.
Snowflake
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| Snowflake as teenager |
Snowflake has yellow-white feathers, a white beak, blue feet with leg feathers, and dark amber eyes. She's about the size of a small papaya or large mango.
Snowflake is second-in-command in the pecking order. She's a compact little hen and weighs a lot for her size. She has three good-sized feathers on each foot, but has lately taken to chewing them off by herself. She tolerates occasional cuddling. She occasionally pecks the others. She's a pretty quiet chicken until a helicopter or large songbird flies overhead. Then she starts making alarm sounds. She crows like a rooster sometimes. Snowflake is a good flier. She goes broody about as much as Swan does (two or three times this summer). She lays light brown eggs that are actually found in the nesting boxes. Snowflake also doesn't have a breed.
Coco
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| Coco as teenager |
Coco has interesting brown feathers, a striped yellow-black beak, pale yellow feet with fuzz down the sides of the legs instead of feathers, and orange eyes. Coco is the same size as Snowflake.
Coco is one rung below Snowflake in the pecking order. She doesn't like to be picked up. She's very plump because she eats constantly. Coco lays pink eggs that are a bit smaller than Swan's. She will hide her eggs under bushes and in tall grass if the "eggs" in the nest boxes have been removed, but she never goes broody. Coco can fly well enough to get onto the fence, or anything else in the yard, with ease. I think she's part Old English Game Bantam from her looks, but I don't think my friend/chicken supplier actually owned any of those.
Qwerty
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| Qwerty as chick |
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| Qwerty as teenager |
Qwerty has mostly black feathers on her back and white on her chest. She has a striped beak like Coco's, yellow feet, and bright amber/yellow eyes. All my chickens are bantams, but she is ridiculously small. She is only a bit bigger than the largest songbird ever to frequent the yard.
Qwerty was named after the keyboard format... long story there. She's at the bottom of the pecking order, but is very smart on how to get food before and when the others are eating. She is hard to catch but will allow herself to be picked up and held afterward. She is my favorite little chicken. Qwerty flies the fastest and highest of all the hens, which often goes unappreciated when she walks along the fence in the morning, every morning. Even though she was the first to lay eggs last December, Qwerty goes broody constantly; as soon as she stops, she starts again after a week or two. I joke that she spends more time brooding than laying. Her infrequent eggs are about the same as Coco's. Not sure about her breed, either.
Group Shots
And here are some more pictures of the chickens:
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| Coco, Qwerty, Bumblebee (roo), Swan or Snowflake as teens |
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| All seven chicks and two unhatched eggs |
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| Swan in back, Snowflake (preening) in front |
As you can see, I have a very diverse and interesting flock. So...
It takes all kinds to make a
world flock.
These photos are over a year old and some are fuzzy. Updated photos coming soon! (my chooks don't like cameras)
