New Hampshire, White Leghorn, and Black Australorp hens lounging around together, May 31, 2009.

The chickens are growing up beautifully.  They are all in an “adolescent” stage, where they don’t quite have their full growth yet, and are not yet laying eggs.  They are, however, mature enough that they look like gorgeous, slightly smaller versions of their adult selves, and they are big enough that we have been able to resolve the identity of the “mystery” chickens. We can now tell the New Hampshire apart from the Cinnamon Queen, and our straight-run Buff-Laced Polish chicken has turned out to be a rooster.

All 8 chickens, labeled for convenience. June 11, 2009

For awhile there, after the rooster started awkwardly crowing but before he developed the distinctive five syllable “cock-a-doodle-do” call, I thought he might simply be a dominant hen.  Dominant hens do crow, and I was really hoping for another egg producer (contrary to my earlier expressed wish for a rooster).  But he has grown into producing a very distinctive rooster call, and I no longer consider him to be a dominant hen.  Well, as long as his crowing doesn’t bother the neighbors, I’d like to keep him around.  He’s already pretty, and will likely be even more so when he is fully grown.

Aaron is very worried that the rooster’s crowing will bother the neighbors, even though they haven’t complained and I hardly notice it myself (although it can get pretty loud).  Aaron’s solution has been to box up the rooster at night, when all the chickens have gone in the coop, and the rooster doesn’t get let out until 9:00 AM.  I have urged Aaron as well to actually talk to our neighbors and ask them if they are bothered by the rooster, instead of just worrying about it, but I don’t know if that will ever happen.

We are also finally able to tell the New Hampshire from the Cinnamon Queen.  They are the same red color (they share some ancestry, as the Cinnamon Queen is a hybrid – Silver Laced Wyandotte Hens with a Rhode Island Red Rooster – or so the internet tells me!), but the New Hamp has dark tail feathers, and the Cinnamon Queen has white or light-colored tail feathers.  I was able to see the color difference upon close examination of the chicks’ tails probably at least six weeks ago, but since this is my first time raising chickens, I didn’t want to say for certain until they looked more like their adult selves.  The Cinnamon Queen also matured a bit faster than the New Hamp, but the New Hamp has since caught up, so there really wasn’t much difference there.  The next real test will be – who lays eggs first?  One of the desirable traits of the hybrid Cinnamon Queen is early egg production.

Cinnamon Queen, April 28, 2009 (a little over a month old)

New Hampshire, April 28, 2009. Note that she still has chick fuzz on her neck (compared to the Cinnamon Queen). She's also a bit smaller.

Aaron is in the process of building a very nice coop for them.  This is a coop designed to hold eight chickens, with 32 square feet of floor space (four sq.ft. per chicken – recommended minimum for free-range chickens).  I mention this because in our research on coop designs, we found lots of designs for 2-4 chickens, but very little that were larger – and also relatively plain.  It seems there is a big leap up from “small and simple” to “large and elaborate” with very little in between!  So ours is an in-between coop  – large and fairly simple.  I’ll be painting it once it’s done – probably a nice yellow color, along with some sort of contrasting trim.  We also want to put it on wheels to move it around easily.

Most people who have backyard chickens, it seems, only get a few, instead of eight like we did.  We got eight because we wanted around 5-6, and it was prudent to get a few extra in case any of them died – and pretty cheap, too – most of the initial expense is in stuff for the chickens.  Well, none of them died!  We have eight very healthy chickens!

The "exit" side of the coop. The right side of the roof tin (in this view) still needs to be trimmed.

The "access" side of the coop, with a door big enough for humans to get in. This side of the coop is a little over 4 feet high.

Their primary feed is Nutrena NatureWise Meatbird feed, which we get from our local Farm and Home Supply store.  We’ve been feeding them that since shortly after we got them.  We could have started them on it, but we didn’t find that out until later, so we started them on medicated chick feed.  We’ll keep them on the meatbird feed until they start laying, which is when we’ll switch them to a layer feed.  I’d love to be able to mix their feed ourselves from locally available ingredients, but that is A LOT of work and cost-prohibitive at this time.

They also eat plenty of grass and whatever bugs they can scrounge out of our lawn.  I like to think they find quite a few – the lawn hasn’t been chemically treated for at least three years, and almost every time I dug into it this spring to give them some dirt clumps to feed on (when they were still kept inside) I found worms.  About once a week or so we give them wheat sprouts that we’ve sprouted ourselves, plus occasionally some sour raw milk – they love both treats!

I’ll post more later on the chicken coop, once Aaron’s got more work done on it – and more on the chickens, once they start laying.

One big happy flock of "teenaged" chickens. June 3, 2009

The cute little fuzzballs are in a comfy box right now out in the garage with a 250 watt lamp keeping them warm (keeping them in the house with a cat and a dog was just not realistic!).  We’ll be raising them to live in the backyard, and they’ll eventually start laying eggs.  I wanted all different kinds, so we got 8 different breeds.  Seven are pullets (hens), and one is a mystery chicken – we won’t know if it is a male or female until it gets older.  I thought about getting a rooster just because they are more colorful than the hens, so I might be happy no matter what gender it is.  Hopefully if it is a rooster it will be a nice quiet gentle one so we won’t have any problems with the neighbors (whose barking dogs would probably be considered more disruptive than a rooster anyway).

In case you’re interested, the breeds we got were:  Ameraucana (Easter Egg chicken), Barred Rock, Black Australorp, Buff Laced Polish, Buff Orpington, Cinnamon Queen, New Hampshire Red, and White Leghorn.  Farm and Home orders their chicks through Cackle Hatchery, so if you’d like to read more about the breeds, you can visit their website.

And here are pictures of our chicks!  I’m amazed at how much they’ve grown in just a few days, although you really can’t tell in the pictures.  None of them (I think) were day old chicks.  I believe they all had been at Farm and Home for at least a few days, and some for a few weeks, which accounts for their various sizes.  Click on the pictures to see a bigger version, which also makes it easier to read the text identifying the breeds.

The 8 chicks, in their box on their first day home (March 27)

The chicks on March 30.

(I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist using the title “Hot chicks” for this post.  I often shock people when I refer to women as “chicks” so I wanted to use the word, for once, when I was actually referring to chickens!)

The chickens are fed a standard ration (Kent Home Fresh 27 Poultry) plus wheat that was grown on the farm, plus whatever they eat when they are outside.

Some chickens wandering around outside the hen house, which is on the left.

You can see two white specks in this picture - two chickens wandering very far afield! They are several hundred feet from the hen house.

Real eggs come in all sizes and colors!

Eggs in the skillet. Look at how upright those yolks are - very firm, and good dark color too (especially the ones in front and on the right).

Another shot of those eggs, which shows the color a bit better.

Because I’ve mentioned the farm’s gorgeous Jersey cows a few times, I thought I’d provide a few pictures as proof, taken in August 2008.

Some cows checking out my hubby and his truck.

Well, hello.

What a gorgeous cow!

The purpose of the following picture is solely to induce spring fever.  I really don’t remember the world ever being this green!!!

A view of the farm, looking north.

Since y’all can look up the book online, I’ll just give you a few things  that stood out for me, given my own background with remote viewing and personal interest in psychic phenomena.

- a researcher working with baby chicks had them imprint on a robot that was programmed to move around at random.  Pre-imprinting trials showed the random nature of the robots movement.  Post imprinting trials showed the robot spending significantly more time near the chicks (who were in a separate but adjacent area where they could see the robot).  (This is on pp 272-273 of the book).  Sheldrake classifies this process as psychokinesis, since the robot is an inanimate object, rather than telepathy.

- a very common research topic that Sheldrake has collected a great deal of data on is the phenomenon of when people know someone is staring at them.  This phenomenon has been proven in thousands of experiments performed by many different people!  Yet when a skeptical/hostile researcher performed this research (he was the one doing the staring at the backs of the experimental subjects heads), he was not able to reproduce positive results.  His intent was apparently to not have positive results.  (p 330).

- interesting quote: “Personal memory can be understood in terms of self-resonance from a person’s own past; it is no longer necessary to suppose that all memories need to be stored as elusive “traces” in the brain.  A less specific resonance with countless other people in the past connects each of us to the collective memory of our society and culture, and ultimately to the collective memory of all humanity.”  (p 316).

To the extent that he is able, he attempts to explain psychic phenomena with “morphic fields” which he outlines in some detail in appendix C of the book.  In short, his concept of morphic fields evolved out of his exploration of morphogenesis – the coming into being of form, like a tree growing from a seed.  It’s pretty complicated and I don’t care to try and summarize here!  Ken Wilbur wrote an essay on Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenesis if you want to read up on it more.

My husband bought this book for me as a Christmas gift because he noticed that, on occasion, my cat would wait for me near the back door several minutes before I got home.  Since reading the book, I have observed this behavior in his dog as well.  This sort of behavior only occurs between animals and humans (or animals and animals) that have some sort of close bond characterized by affection and/or respect.

This is an excellent read by a very thorough and well-qualified researcher, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in psychic phenomena.