Our chooks page........

• Do you believe that your breed of chicken has more benefits than all the others those other people keep ?
• Are home eggs tastier than supermarket ones ?
• Do you spend every morning re-planting flowers that you chooks dug up yesterday ?
• Is your home full of boxes of chicks, all different ages ?
• Is your electricity useage for incubators, brooders, and garden lighting draining the National Grid ?

Just like our son Paul, our chooks know how to drink, party and boogie the night away before just sleeping wherever they end up............

Our chosen breed is the Sussex, as it is a good utility bird, producing plenty of eggs whilst also a good meat bird for the table. We made a start by visiting a breeder not too far away from us, and bought all of the things that we needed, including two Light Sussex hens.
They must have instantly recognised us as beginners, and it wasn't a very good start for us. The house we were sold
(a double-decker ark) really wasn't suitable for large breeds.
We were also told it would hold "5 or 6 birds".....no way ! Bantams maybe, but not a heavy breed like Sussex.

Unfortunately they also sold us sick birds, when they knew that there were other sick birds in the same pen. We were too new and naive to realise that this was dangerous, and as a consequence we nearly lost several very beautiful birds that were put with them later. The result was that I had to destroy one of these first birds, and had to learn how to give twice-daily injections to all the others. That is an experience that you have to try for yourselves to realise how scary it is for a newbie !

These were our first girls - Myrtle and Ginny - making themselves at home in the shrubbery bed.
Myrtle had to be destroyed immediately, but Ginny seemed to make a good recovery. We were told that Ginny would be "laying by Christmas" but in March (at 40 weeks) she still hadn't come into lay, was off her food, and when I inspected her she was a bag of bones with no meat on her at all. With a heavy heart I decided to put her out of her misery too.

This is him - Hagrid, on the allotment where he likes to strut his stuff. He really is a big handsome boy, and he has since proved that he's very fertile with plenty of hatching eggs. In fact he's a randy so-and-so, and wo betide any crows or rooks that get caught out in the open !.

With Hagrid we also got Hermione. She is rather special to us as she was our first hen to produce an egg.
She also lays beautiful big eggs, and so far we have a 99% hatch records from her.
Can you spot any theme running through our names yet ?
We love hermie as she has a comb that leans over and it looks like a red beret. She reminds us of a French tart lady.

We went back to Lester and bought two more hens. One of them - Minerva - was already laying, and it didn't take long for Sybill to join her.

In the meantime we had borrowed a small incubator, and we bought 6 eggs by post through E-Bay. Only two hatched, but it was such an exciting experience that we were hooked !

Here you see the little monsters darlings at one day, three weeks, and five weeks old. If you have never incubated eggs, then we can really recommend it as an exciting and awe-inspiring experience. Watching the chicks struggle hour after hour to get out of the shell, to finally get out totally exhausted but raring to go makes you feel very humble. Within 3 days they have the flight feathers on their wings, and their growth and development has to be seen to be believed !

Following our initial success with these two, we then incubated eight of Hermie's eggs and bingo all of them hatched !
Their pictures are at the top of this page.

We then turned our attention towards Buff Sussex. I love the traditional "farmyard brown hen" and was keen to get some. It turned out to be harder than I thought, but on Christmas Eve I drove a 5-hour round trip to pick up a lovely trio.

Millicent Harry and Mandy joined the flock. They are beautiful and I love 'em to bits.
Unfortunately they too brought infection into the flock, and I had more practice on my injection-giving skills !
Luckilly, they seem to have made a full recovery, as have my other chooks that were infected by them.
We definitely have a closed flock now, and in future any new blood will be from eggs bought in.
Both hens were laying by the beginning of February.

I guess that as Harry's name is central to all our other names, we'd better give him his own picture ! He was only a young lad when we got him, but has now developed a nice tail and comb. He crows in a completely different key to Hagrid.

On the 9th of January we hatched our third batch - a mix of Hermione and Minerva's eggs. Minnie's eggs are a little small, and only three hatched, but Hermie kept up her record when nine of hers made it into a brave new world.

During February we realised that the two birds we hatched first were both cock birds. We were going to keep one and eat one, but then realised that both had badly bent toes as a result of inbreeding, so we decided that we couldn't use them for breeding. In March we killed them at 16 weeks and although it wasn't pleasant and the gutting was even worse, I have to tell you that they tasted BEAUTIFUL !

At the beginning of February I had a mad moment on E-Bay and bought 3 lots of hatching eggs !
We have fired the incubator up and set nine Speckled Sussex and six Buff Sussex (heavies) and six bantam Buff Sussex.
Unfortunately the results of the hatch were very disappointing. We only got three Speckled's and one each of the large and bantam Buffs. Our success rate from posted eggs has been very poor compared with the high fertility rate of of our own hens eggs. The new babies are very pretty though, after getting used to the plain yellow chicks of Light Sussex.

Here's the large buff at two weeks.



....and one of the Speckled's......



...and the smallest member of our flock, the Buff bantam.
They are all so pretty, we love them.

The three Speckled's were a cock and two hens. We thought about keeping the cock (Fluffy) but he was a brother to the two hens and so we passed him on to another plotholder, where he will have about 30 Lohmann wives and will probably die of a heart attack, a very happy boy.

At the beginning of April our resolution about a "closed flock" went out of the window when we visited a bird auction !
We fell in love with a light Sussex broody bantam and her 8 one-day old chicks.........

Bella joined the flock. She is a wonderful mum who sat tight with her babies all through the auction and all the way home.
It must have been a very traumatic day for her, but she has settled down really well into her new home - an old rabbit hutch that we conveniently bought the previous week. At the time I commented that it would make a "good broody coop".

Of course we couldn't keep just one bantam ! There was another lot in the same auction and Charlie Katie and Penny joined our growing flock. We hope they will supply us with lots of lovely little eggs, so that we can breed lots of lovely little balls of fluff. Of course, with three bantam hens (who often go broody) we will be able to hatch many more eggs than with just the incubator !