Week 6: Roosters



 Last Spring and Summer we had quite a few chickens decide to set and hatch eggs.  After the first batch, we would take the newly hatched babies to the hen that was already raising a brood.  She eventually ended up with about twenty chicks!  We kept them in a chicken tractor (a wire cage that can be moved all over the yard to provide new grass) untill they got their actual feathers.  We then move them to the Chicken House in a dog crate overnight, just to let them see where their new house was going to be.  We then let them out in the morning with the rest of the chickens.  Usually they knew where to go to at night, but not always.  We had a few of the older chicks that stayed out at night and we had to sneak up on them once they roosted and grab them.  We then deposited them in the Chicken House for the night.  This lasted about a month, then finally we were able to get them to go to the house at night by themselves.

 

 

Quite a few of those chicks turned out to be roosters.  Here are a couple pictures of two of our roosters. 

 

 

This rooster is a golden color with darker gold turning to black in the tail area. 

 

 All of the chicks that hatched were mixed breeds, so we got some interesting looking ones!

 

 

This rooster is a Barred Rock crossed with a Buff Orpington, I think.

He has the normal Barred Rock coloring with bright orange on the midsection of his wings.

You can visit my Flickr page to see both of these pictures in color.  They are in the set called "Around the Farm"

 

We have about six other roosters.  In all we have Forty-Three chickens.

We really enjoy having the fresh eggs!  Store eggs cannot compare in taste or color!

You can immediately tell the farm eggs from the store eggs just by the color of the yolk.

In farm eggs the yolk is a dark orange, in the store eggs the yolk is a pale yellow.

 

We also have a variety in the color of the egg shells.  We have white, brown, dark brown, pale brown with darker brown spots, blue, gray-blue, green, blue-green, and an occasional dark gray-brown.  Maybe sometime I can get some pictures of the different shell colors and share them with you all.

 

Do you raise chickens/eggs?