Muppet Babies!

It was only a matter of time before the chickens came to be featured here. We have 13 at the moment, all kept up at my friend's smallholding in a share-the-work, share-the-eggs arrangement. We didn't mean to end up with quite so many, but let me tell you, chickens are addictive!

You think you can just keep three, then you see a card on the big board at Farmways advertising a breed you really love, and you go to have a look because the place is quite close, and you're being very firm with yourself that you're only buying one chicken - two at the absolute outside - and you arrive home clutching four cardboard boxes, because you fell in love with the mad, fluffy white thing that looks like a Muppet, your smallest daughter had her heart set on a Black Rock, then there were the two utility (read less decorative) birds you originally went for, and the breeder just had to go and show you the blue-egg layer with little wacky cheek tufts.

This is called Chicken Madness, and leads to further insanities such as Breeding Your Own Chickens. The white Muppet chicken pictured at the top of this post, a bantam Silkie who got christened Tufty Duck because of her endearing habit of quacking rather than clucking, went broody a few weeks ago. This means she had a sudden surge of girlie hormones, and got grumpy and mumsy and wanted to lay eggs and sit on them and not move, thank you very much. So we moved her into a little broody run by herself (but still inside the main run so she could see her mates), and let her sit on a batch of her own eggs, plus three fertile eggs from our Buff Orpingtons. This is a Buffy:

They are basically a large, orange, feathery football with beak and feet. Utterly dim, utterly charming, very therapeutic to cuddle as they'll sit on your knee and let you stroke them like a cat. You can see why we'd want more!

So Tufty Duck sat on her eggs for 21 days, and on the 21st day, they hatched! One poor little Silkie didn't make it much further than getting out of the egg, but the rest seemed fine - then I noticed one of the Buffy chicks had one eye glued shut the next morning, so I had to take it away and neck it. If that seems heartless to you, consider this: last year we reared a batch of five chicks in an incubator. One got the gluey eye thing. Next day it was two, and they were bubbly-eyed and sneezing. We separated them off from the others, treated them with eye drops, antibiotics in the food, nursed them devotedly for months - and in the end still had to neck them because the vet said that even if their eyes and airways eventually cleared up, they'd probably be carriers and when we put them back in with the rest of the flock they would all get it, whatever it is. I hate killing things, but sometimes it's the only right thing to do.

The next day, we found another Silkie chick dead. We're not sure, but we think Tufty might have accidentally trodden on the poor little squeaker in the dash to get inside the nestbox door.

So now we're down to four surviving chicks, all looking healthy - two Silkies, two Buffies - and in the last few days their wing feathers have grown exponentially! Now they're flapping and hopping about their run like fluffy Golden Snitches. So sweet. Here's the proud mum with her kids and foster-kids:

One of the Buffies has been christened Little Dorrit, the pale-coloured Silkie is Honey, and the black Silkie is Velveteen (like the Rabbit). I will no doubt drivel on at length in future posts about them. You have been warned.