April 2, 2012

Outside Temp: 32 F (another beautiful day... no rain, although I'm sure that by saying that, it will pour tomorrow!)

What I cooked today:
Orange Chicken: It seemed appropriate, all things considered.  And it always gets eaten up!

Update:
We did it!! 

I'm still a little shocked that we did, but we actually got chicks today!

 All together... now play nice. 

 So cute! 

We picked them up around 11am.  The store had a delivery this morning, so there were plenty to go around.  We ended up with:
10 - Partridge Rock (these said they were all female, but the women helping us wasn't so sure - they are brown with some black)
6 - Black Australorp (these were not sexed, so it's a coin flip as to how many male and female)
2 - Black Star (females)
2 - Red Star (females - These are more orange or dark yellow now)
4 - Cornish Roaster (both male and female, but it doesn't matter since you slaughter them around 8-10 weeks, before they either lay or could fertilize any eggs - they are light yellow, exactly what you expect from a chick)

We made up their box and tossed all 24 in together.  One of the Partridge Rocks started pecking at one of the Cornish Roasters.  So, we had to take him away from the group for some time-out.  A few minutes later, one of the Australorps decided he wanted to peck at the Cornish, so he joined his new 'brother' in time out.  Of course, time-out became a game of playing in Patrick's beard...

These two were removed from the group for fighting... they decided they liked Patrick's beard!


We kept an eye on them all day.  The kids were enchanted.  Even Ryan didn't want to play his video games, he had real live animals in his house... awesome!  As you can see from the picture below, we used spoons for mirrors to give the chicks something other than each other to peck at. 

Finally, around 4-5pm, we realized that the brown and black chicks were pecking at the yellow and red chicks.  And not just normal "you're in my way" pecking.  Straight for the eyes, every time.  We realized that the lighter chicks were getting picked on by the darker chicks.  Apparently, they just couldn't get along...

We made up a second box (thank goodness Patrick's dad brought down a second heat lamp), and put all the light colored chicks in the new box.  Immediately, the pecking stopped.  Who knew?

 Only yellow and red birds in this box... 

 Black and brown birds over here. 

The Cornish will be full grown in about 8-10 weeks, and then they'll be gone (into my freezer, they do not lay), and the Red Star's will be continual layers, so we won't really be using them for meat. Hopefully, they will get along when they get older. I've read that if you separate the flocks, they are hard to put back together, since it disrupts the pecking order (who knew that term actually referred to chickens?).

We'll have to see how this adventure goes.  Assuming they are still alive in the morning.