Another chook is up the creek. So I now have 3 sets of chicks in the chook house and two chooks in the maternity ward. But one in the maternity ward is, how can I put this politely? Senile? She's not got all the brain cells she was hatched with... So she's on eggs that don't matter as much if nothing happens, though she seems to have now got the hang of sitting on the eggs rather than in front of, behind or to either side of (or all 4 at once) and the eggs we bought for her are in an incubator that we had to hire to save them. So we filled the incubator with extra eggs because there is always a market for Easter eggers (chooks where the colour of the egg lain is multi choice)and a week later this chook goes broody. Only she's one of the 3 that lays these Easter eggers eggs... So now shes sitting on another 8... So between the 6 my mad girl is on, the 10 she didn't manage to sit on, the additional 14 that went in to the incubator to fill it (and pay for it) and the additional 8 Lothos is now sitting on, I will be expecting somewhere between 0 and 38 chicks in the next 2-3 weeks! This is on top of the 3, 4 & 5 that are additions to our flock from before Christmas... The flock had however lost the chook that went missing. We think she was probably been taken most likely from sitting on an insecure nest having gone broody on us and gone au Naturalle for her nest site. She'll be missed because she was such a sweet timid girl and we still have her 'twin'. An identical sister from the same clutch and the only way of telling them apart unless you had both of them in your hands and knew them was by the leg band one of them (the survivor) wears.
I think when the auctions start up again (they stop in the summer months because it is simply too hot to conduct them) we will have to have a clear out of some of the flock. I doubt any more than 19 or 20 of the potential 38 will hatch and only half of those will be female (saleable) but even with those numbers, the idea of adding an extra 9 or 10 to the 19 adults we currently have and probable 6 females of the current 12 chicks running around... It's simply too many too feed.
shame because we have the space just not the money... When it's dry here there is not much for the chooks to eat and summer is dry and
it's summer now...
]. I still have a few Italian notes that came from my father when he served in Italy in 1944.
