THE END OF JUNE--THE END OF HATCHING

The temperature here is 99 degrees in the shade! I live in a little valley about 12 miles from the coast to the north and about 7 miles from Tillamook Bay to the south. I had to laugh at the temperature given for Nehalem on my computer: it gives the temperature as 66 degrees! But that is for the City of Nehalem, which is about eight miles to the north of here. I did drive in to Nehalem this morning and it was definitely cooler than at my house.

It is so hot outside,that I decided to cancel my plans to inventory my chickens, and decided to start packing away my incubators in my office/computer room, where I hatch and brood chicks for a few days before I transfer them out to bigger brooders. The room definitely needs cleaning.  I would be through hatching eggs by now but I decided to try an experiment. I read in "The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, by Harvey Ussery; How long can you store an egg before it looses its hatchability? He says about two weeks, which is about the time it takes a hen to get her clutch of eggs ready for setting. To be conservative he says ten days. My incubator bible says 4 days.

But the author tells a story of a woman who had sold all her eggs when a fox killed her prize cock. Desperate, this woman went to her customers and asked if they had any of her eggs left. From the refrigerators of her customers she gathered enough eggs to try and salvage that particular line of chicken. And she had an excellent hatch rate! What! I exclaimed as I read this. Well, by golly I am going to try this too! And so my remaining incubator is full of "Fridge" eggs! I have no dates but some will be as old as two weeks of that I am sure. 

                                                             

Charlie chicken says"I'm hidin' - she aint putting me in no fridgerator!

WILL THE REAL EASTER BUNNY PLEASE STAND UP?

My little dog Poppy used to chase my roosters any time she got a chance. Now that she is seven she has sort of figured out that it is OK to chase the roosters when I get my net out but not until then. So I can leave her out in the yard with the chickens and not worry. She actually does not have a very good chance of catching one, since most of them fly up on something to escape her. However I noticed that she goes into the small pens when they are open and looks around in them, I don't know what she is expecting to find but it doesn't hurt anything, so I don't worry about it.

I began to notice eggs laying around here and there in my yard. Whole eggs! I thought it was the pack rats moving them because I have a lot of trouble with pack rats trying to take the chicken feeders,  but i couldn't figure out how they they do it. None of the eggs were broken, I figured they were rolling them but that seemed a little farfetched.

Then one day I saw Poppy pawing at something on the ground so I went over and saw that it was an egg, and it wasn't broken. So I broke it for her and the contents went on the ground and she ate the contents of the egg. Raw egg is good food for a dog!. Then I realized that it is she who is taking the eggs, carrying them in her mouth without breaking them. You can't really see her do it because she has a very hairy face.

So that ends the mystery of the  eggs in the garden. I decided to feed my dogs a raw egg twice a week, I have plenty of eggs and that should help with the dog food budget!

A NEW YEAR

Here it is, almost the end of January 2013. Thinking back I remember the losses of chickens to predators last spring. I hope I am better protected now. All the small pens have small wire that prevents raccoons from sticking their paws into the pens. Where there was digging under, wire has been placed on the ground around the outside of the pens. I have put more secure fasteners on the doors to the pens and that is all I can think of doing for them.

A red tailed hawk has killed several of my free ranging orange frizzled roosters. Why it always chose those particular roosters, I don't know. The red tailed hawk has not been seen for months now.

Lately a big lab mix has been pushing himself under the wire to the big chicken yard. He is a big dog. It is amazing that he can do this. I caught him several times and put him out. He doesn't seem focused on killing chickens although maybe he is thinking of grabbing one and taking it home.  I had some old collapsible dog fencing and put it up along the part of the fence he pushed under. It seems to keep him out. He did it again in another location and I added some more collapsible fencing to that part too. Then this morning he was in my front yard, but I hadn't let the chickens out yet. So far he is batting zero. He doesn't act like he is after chickens but who knows?

I lost some chickens to disease too. I had purchased some Baytril from a pigeon supply. It was pretty expensive, but I thought it would be helpful in combating any disease a chicken might get.  I had treated Blondie successfully with Baytril purchased from a local vet, although she has not produced a healthy egg since! But Baytril didn't help Little Lumpy, my mostly white rooster I used for breeding, and I lost Bug, my very favorite rooster for breeding smaller chickens. I began to feel that Baytril was killing them, as they seemed to get better and then died.

A fellow who raises pigeons and bought some chickens from me told me about Tylin 200. It is an injectable, so when another chicken got sick I purchased some Tylin 200 and the local vet showed me how to give a shot, and the vet mentioned Gentamicin, another antibiotic that you can use in steam or fog, and since I have a fogging device I used that and put some drops of lavender in the water too as he suggested. That combination seemed to work miracles on respiratory disease and I felt I could now cure anything.

But then I noticed my best chicken pal Ms. Chocolatte roosting in a very strange way, with her head pointed skyward, her beak in the air. I noticed she was coughing.  I brought her in the house for the "miracle" treatment. It helped maybe a little. She no longer extended her neck to breathe. She looked good though, her feathers were all in good condition and she was in full feather, but under her feathers she was very thin.  I kept on taking care of her, offering her the best of whatever she liked to eat, plus vitamin D, cod liver oil, etc. I felt it would take longer to cure her because she was sicker than the others.

I got out my chicken health book and found that extension of the neck and gasping for breath are the signs of infectious laryngotracheitis, which is a disease caused by a herpes virus which has an intermediate host of a particular kind of a cockroach which lives in the south. Ms. Choco came from Lousiana, so I figured she probably carried the herpes virus and when she got stressed, it took over.

Her eyes started closing and so I washed her eyes and then read that chickens may go blind, and she apparently did gradually go blind as she could no longer see the food I was offering. But I figured out a way that she could eat; she knew I was putting food in a paper tray and so she would stab at the tray often getting quite a bit of food down. I still thought she might make it, but she didn't, and one morning I found her dead.

She was a real pal and always came forward to greet me whenever I showed up. I hope she enjoyed her life here. I fixed up the patio pen with her in mind, and put in that nice rock fountain that she enjoyed drinking out of. On warm days I let the small flock out of the pen to wander around the back yard. The picture on the home page of by website shows Ms. Choco, Bug, and some of the others enjoying the garden.

She was the one who instigated our friendship. Will there be another Ms. Choco some day? RIP Ms. Choco.

SUMMER ENDS WITH A BANG AND A POULTRY SHOW

SUMMER ENDS WITH A BANG AND A POULTRY SHOW

I was very busy outside this summer. I heard someone say that we had 100 days of no rain - which must be some kind of record. And I was very busy gardening, growing vegetables and berries, and stuff for the chickens. And that is my excuse for not entering anything in my blog. I was so tired at the end of each day.

The 2012 Northwest Winter Classic Double Poultry Show was held in Salem, Oregon, October 13 and 14th. I made it to the show and that is exactly the time mother nature decided to end summer with a ton of wind and rain. So while I was at the show, mother nature blew and soaked all my pens. I was really surprised that so much water could come into pens with roofs and whose sides were half covered.

We are back in water world again.

The show was held at the Salem Fairgrounds in the Pavilion Building. Everything was under one big cover. Unless you have a white Serama (this type has been accepted by the ABA-The American Bantam Association) Your Seramas will be judged the Table Top way - which is how they do it in Malaysia. I like this way because you get a score card that gives points for:  type, chest, tail, wings, legs, condition, feather quality, character and performance, which all together should total 100.  I entered 5 chickens: three roosters and two hens. One of my hens won reserve champion, and I got a ribbon. Nice! I am really working on my hens. I would like to put a picture in here of my hen and her ribbon but my daughter took pictures with her camera, so I don't really have much to show with my pictures.

I can show you sort of what the Serama section looks like, with the two tall, round table tops. They put your Serama on the table and the judge scores the bird as I mentioned above, but the most important thing is character and performance - total 25 points, showing how your chicken acts on the table. For roosters - crowing, wing flapping, talking, strutting, etc. For hens it is a little hard to get points - they don't do too much.

I received a really nice gift from a young woman who I had corresponded with via e-mail about Seramas. She had purchased a really nice type chocolate frizzle hen from Pixie Chickens, and a beautiful lemon-blue rooster from LA Seramas. But she had just gotten the opportunity to purchase her first home, and she couldn't take her chickens with her. So she gave them to me - What a gift!  A beautiful pair of chickens. I will try to have pictures for my next blog.

The pictures here show the Serama layout with the two tables for TT judging. And a row of Seramas, mine, from right to left count five.

SUMMER UPDATE

Here we are in the second half of July. The weather is definitely livable as opposed to the winter months but it goes by so fast.

Who passed away this year? Little Lumpy, my hope for a pure white rooster,

Chester, my new acquisition and hope for bigger chests in my American Seramas, and he left no genes behind. Ms. Apple who came with Chester, she left no genes behind either. My little blackish rooster, sweet, father of Black Betty, and my hope for a totally black rooster. The last of my lovely laying leghorn ladies, Ms. Gray, My young, small, blue laced golden cocopop.rooster, hope for better chickens in the future, who actually left one, just one chick behind. He was killed by raccoons that also got five other roosters, along with the hawks who got two.

Who is new? A Black silkie pair, Lucy and Capt. Midnight. Happy, a really good type hen, lone survivor of four newly purchased chickens, and two very large frizzled roosters who are definitely leaving genes behind, and soon to be added, a silkie hen and white rooster with barring.

What is new? Well, since the predator attacks, I don't like to let my chickens out unless I can watch them all day. So I decided to plant wheat grass, oat grass and clover and also herbs and flowers that the chickens might like to eat in small rectangular planters and I take these planters to them in their yard. Chickens really like to eat grass and other greens, so they really enjoy these, even though they practically demolish them.  Then I haul the planters out at the end of the day and try to restore them for a week or two, until I can put them back in the pens.

I also purchased a new incubator as my oldest one no longer kept a reliable temperature.  I purchased a R-com King Suro 20, with automatic temperature and humidity. It works great; I had doubts about the humidity, but no problems with the incubator. These incubators are made in Korea and the web site for these is not usable for Americans, yet.  I thought I would have problems with parts and service but I purchased this incubator on e-bay, and the seller is great. The cradle for turning had problems right away and finally broke about two months after use. I can't access any web site and no telephone numbers are furnished in the user' s manual, but the sellers are really helpful. I couldn't ask for more. They are sending a part right away. I also considered getting a Brinsea 20, but I found that this company has terrible customer service and so I avoid buying their products, even though I think they are very good. I have two Brinsea mini advance incubators and they are chugging away after three years.

I have lots of chicks now for my small hobby farm, about 40, with about 40 more to come, and that is more than enough for me to sort out and take care of.

I hope the rest of the summer is enjoyable for you. Try to get some sun and some fun!

THE LAST STRAW (of the season)

I   have been thinking of writing about my own personal experience with sick chickens. Chickens tend to get sick during the very wet ,cold, and windy winter and spring in this area. Especially now that the rainfall here seems to be heavier even though it doesn't rain longer, so that there is always standing water in the chicken yard. I finally took to laying straw down in the chicken yards to soak up the water and lessen the contact with mud. Why did it take me so long to think of this? I'm just getting old I guess and it takes me longer to find simple solutions. Putting straw down works out so well. The eggs are clean, my boots stay much cleaner, and I believe it helps with the health of the chickens. The last straw for the winter was just laid down. Doesn't the yard look nice?

  

The first time I went to a poultry show with chickens to enter, I took both the hens to a vet before taking them to the show. They were both healthy and tested negative for any disease. When I brought them back from the show I noticed that Blondie was making little gurring noises. I thought that was cute. Like she was telling me that she didn't approve of whatever I was doing. I took her to the vet again because i wanted to check her fertility.  And the vet said, well she has a cold, can't you hear that? (gurring!)  So we need to treat her cold and then test her fertility. I felt kind of stupid, she did not look sick or even act sick really. So chickens can be sick without looking like the traditional sick bird sitting all hunched up and not eating etc. So the vet prescribed  Baytril  - one drop every day for seven days. This did not help.

She remained sick until I read on a blog by a vet that raised Seramas that Baytril should be given for 14 days or longer in tablet form until the chicken is well. And that really messes up their fertility for quite a while. Blondies eggs came out with bad shells and funny shapes. At the end of the season I got one fertile egg from Blonde but it did not hatch. (Her problem with fertility was that she was very feathery - soft feathers is the term- and when I trimmed the feathers away from her vent she did get a fertile egg.

Shows are very stressing for the chicken. Some people give antibiotics both before and after a show. There are other products available to give a chicken at a show that can boost their immunity and lessen the effects of stress. Pay close attention when you are observing your chickens and when they act differently - check it out. 

CHESTER, THE NEW YARD ROOSTER

The roosters that I have bred, while I like their looks a lot, don't have quite enough chest to be winners (except for one that I bred and discovered early this spring, which surprised me. He'll go to the show for sure). So I purchased a rooster late last fall that I think will help with the chest problem. Hence the name Chester. And this is his picture. Today, after giving him a bath and cleaning him all up for introduction to the ladies , he had his first day out in the sunshine with thirty hens.

Now I have a problem here for those that might be interested in purchasing eggs; roosters can only take care of so many hens, and I only have so many pens, which at this time are filled with roosters. So I am hoping that within the next two weeks the weather will permit me to clear out some cages so that I can see that Chester has a place to be with about six hens (experts say ten but why push it?) Also it takes about two weeks for the hens to accept a new rooster, and to produce fertile eggs.

So that's where we are now. waiting ....................