More Chickens, Coming Up!

It's so hard in the spring, walking into the feed stores and the local Wilco farm store and seeing the big brooders full of cute, fuzzy, peeping chicks. So cute! So tempting! So far, I've resisted the urge to even touch the little balls of fluff, let alone purchase any, but it's like some low-level addiction. I've wanted to increase my flock again anyway...but I'm not sure I want to explain it to my husband.

Well, as is often the way, nature took care of it for me! My game hen cross, who has the not-very-matronly name of Racer X, decided last week that spring had sprung, and that meant she needed to have babies. She stopped laying, started sitting, and is now a big puffed-up ball of hissing feathers whenever I open the coop door. Poor sad little girl keeps switching nests to find the one with the biggest pile of eggs, and I keep stealing the eggs. Right now she's sitting on three golf balls and looking pretty smug about it.

I emailed the gal who gave me Racer X last year, and she brought me half a dozen fertile eggs. Tomorrow we'll reassemble the brooding pen and nest box, install Racer X, and then slip the eggs under her at night. Hopefully in three weeks we'll have a little flock of puffballs running around! The eggs are from a blue cochin father and a buff orpington mother, so I have no idea what they'll look like as chicks or as adults, but they're two of my favorite breeds, so it really doesn't matter!

Birdies Birdies Everywhere

Today was apparently the Day of the Birds around here!

Last week, a gal posted on PDXBackyardChix that she had three "escape artist" hens she needed to rehome. She got an offer in Oregon City, but she lives not too far from me, and that's a long ways from where we are. I happened to see the post then, and offered to take the girls to enhance my flock. They were delivered today; two Buff Orpington girls and a little game hen which apparently lays bluish eggs. They will be added to my three Buff Orpingtons and one Rhode Island Red tonight after dark. (Mama and the four chicks are still sequestered, but they will be integrated eventually as well.)

While I was chatting with the gal and her husband, I happened to glance over and saw a flailing thing in the potted fuschia. I thought at first it was a mouse, but it turned out to be one of the baby House Sparrows which had fallen out of the nest. Its eyes were not yet open, it was not feathered at all, and it was chilled. I picked it up, and with the help of the chicken folks, tried to put it back in the nest. I got it back inside, but after the folks left I watched the Mama Sparrow try to figure out how to get past the baby and into the nest, so I decided to work on it some more.

I got up onto a ladder (NOT my first choice in any event) and took down the nest. I didn't think the lid came off, but the little neighbor girl suggested undoing the main screw on the front, and lo and behold, the lid does come off. The nest box was literally stuffed to the rafters with dry grasses, moss, and feathers. Turns out it was a good thing I opened it up; the actual nest cavity was in the very back of the house, with a little tunnel leading to it. The baby would never have made it back that far, and I'm not entirely certain how it got out. I pulled some of the nesting out, picked up the little escapee, and snuggled it back into the nest with its siblings. I got Todd to rehang it, and I've seen Mama bird coming in and out of the nest, probably trying to figure out how all her babies got upside down and why the house is such a mess. Hopefully all is well inside the nest tonight!

Final Chick Tally

Of the original dozen eggs we put under the broody hen, we have four survivors. To my untrained eye, they appear to be three Rhode Island Reds and a Silver Laced Wyandotte. The only reason I can even guess that closely is that I know I only got RIR and SLW eggs, plus one Aracauna which was easily identified because it was a blue egg, and it didn't hatch.

We had four eggs that simply didn't hatch. No idea why. Mama sat on them religiously, turned them, and protected them. They might have gotten too warm in this week's heat spell. We also had three chicks that almost made it, but didn't quite. Two were apparently stepped on by Mama when they were in the middle of hatching, and one just looks like it didn't quite have the energy to pip all the way around the shell. One egg was crushed on the first night by the klutzy Mama.

All four babies and proud Mama hen are in their own mini enclosure out right next to the main chicken coop. They have their own food and water, their own nest, and a little ramp for getting into the nest. The ramp proved necessary after I went out to check on them last night and found the littlest chick sitting forlornly outside the nest box, peeping and unable to climb into the nest to join its foster Mama and foster siblings. I put the chick under Mama for the night, and we took care of the problem today with the ramp.

Now we have to see if Mama does a good job of raising them, and wait to see whether they're hens or roosters! (Crossing my finger that the SLW is a hen, because I'd like to have one!)

House Sparrows

Apparently my yard is ideal House Sparrow breeding ground. Well, given how prolific they are in general and how adaptable, I'm not sure that's any great distinction, but it's certainly no less true. On the eaves of my front porch there is a battered old bird house, which came with the house when we bought it. The former owners said the bird house was occupied every year, but they didn't know what kind of birds used it. Early this spring, I found out it was a pair of House Sparrows. And now months later, they're still using it.

So far, I've seen them hatch out three clutches of eggs. The last clutch fledged a few days ago, and I happened to step out onto the porch just as one of the babies was contemplating a maiden flight. I tried to be quiet and unobtrusive, but those words are not in the vocabulary of my four year old daughter. The sparrow ended up leaping from the little landing pad on the birdhouse and taking wobblingly to the air, aiming towards the dogwood tree. It made it to the tree, and after crashing through the leaves, it did manage to land. I tried not to laugh, and I was glad it looked like it would be okay.

Not too long after that, I started hearing the peeping sound I've come to realize means either 1) chicks are hungry or 2) mating season is back. The sound that the female bird makes during the courtship rituals is, to my human ears, very much like that of the chicks in the nest, to the point that if I hadn't known for sure the chicks had fledged, I'd have had to go look to see whether it was feeding or mating activity. The sparrows will mate off and on, all over my porch and gutters, for a couple of days, and then start their fourth clutch. I'm assuming it's the same pair, as they seem to be marginally territorial about their nest and the immediate environs, and I've seen them fight off other birds interested in the nest.

Next spring, I will be studying the one house we have for dimensions and construction, and putting up more around the yard, probably on large poles or up in the dogwood and cedar trees. The only difference I want to be sure to make is the ability to clean out the house, as this one doesn't have any way to open it. We have a whole flock of the little critters, so I'm hoping to encourage more than one pair to mate and hang out where I can watch. I hadn't realized how many we really had living on the property or nearby until a couple of days ago when my husband directed my attention to the patch of dirt he'd shoveled out of the front yard and spread over a patch of ground we're preparing to turn into a berry patch. There, on the dried-out dirt, dozens of little House Sparrows were taking very vigorous and chatty dust baths. This morning I peeked out the living room windows and the entire flock was at it again, having a party in the dust.

Birds, Birds, Everywhere

The baby robins have fledged. They sure grew quickly!

This was taken June 4th. Little more birdlike and less fuzzy than the first pink things that came out of the eggs...

And June 7th. What a difference a few days makes!

And finally June 13th, the evening before they all fledged and spread out. Way to go, Momma Robin!

Things keep rolling even when I'm not...

I've been sick for over two solid weeks now. I came down with my husband's cold the Saturday I was in Boise for my second cousin's graduation. And then it just hung on. Coughing, lost voice, fatigue, lots of fun. Apparently I had some severe allergy attacks on top of the cold, which triggered my mostly-latent asthma. I ended up having to go to the doctor to get a Proventil inhaler, then hit the MucinexD hard. (Side note: in my state, you practically have to sign over your first born child to acquire MucinexD, due to the pseudoephedrine content. I don't care. It works.) Then the cottonwood bloomed like a summer blizzard, and took me out again. Finally got smart and slept the entire day on Saturday, and almost felt human today. Almost. I'm getting there.

But while I was sick, things kept moving along, as they tend to do. Last Friday I got a call from Will Dart letting me know he had another huge swarm of bees for me, to try again. This time I was home to see the installation, though I had to watch from inside because I was feeling so awful. Fortunately, we put the hive directly below one of the screened living room windows, so I could chat with Will and Todd while Evie and I watched from inside. After the bees were offloaded into their home, I went out with a plate of honey water as an offering, and went back inside to watch them drink it all up. The good news is, this time the bees seem to have approved of their new home. They are still there a couple of days later, doing their bee-thing.

I went out tonight and moved the false back of the hive to the second to last top bar slot, vastly increasing their home space. While I was doing this, the neighbor kids came over to watch, and I let them all look inside the viewing window briefly since it was cool and late in the evening, so almost all the bees were inside and completely disinterested in any goings-on outside the hive. I've been deemed "cool" and asked if I had any more interesting things in my yard. So, I showed them the empty robins' nest and where the bumblebees live.

Yes, the robin nest is empty. The three baby robins have grown over the last couple of weeks, and finally fledged this morning. The mother robin was chasing one of the "teenagers" around the yard and into the arborvitae hedge, still trying to stuff it full of worms. Silly momma. I'm leaving the nest for now in case she decides to reuse it, but in the fall I'll bring it in the house.

The second batch of Old World Sparrows has fledged out of the front birdhouse as well. The mother and father bird are making overtures towards one another and the nest that make me think we might have a third clutch coming up very soon as well. Prolific little critters; explains why we have so many of them in the yard!