Chicken Math

I've always liked math. I can add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus... pretty much everything except the accounting classes I had to take in college were all okay with me. Chicken math, however, is an entirely different thing and it has apparently taken over at my house. 

I had read during my incessant research that they were kind of like potato chips - you can't have just one... or in our case, just 4. We started in March with 4 black Australorps. When they were just days old, I was hooked and ordered more eggs. This time I ordered Lemon Cuckoo Orpingtons! Orpingtons had been my second choice for breeds when I was starting this venture so I decided to split the flock.

When they arrived, they had been badly damaged by the postal carrier. The farmer packed them well, but the box had been through the ringer. Only 3 of 8 eggs were intact and knowing that they had obviously been sloshed around pretty hard, I wasn't very positive that any would hatch. I set the 3 eggs anyway, cause you never know, right? I contacted the shipper, just to let her know about the issue. She felt terrible and said she'd send more eggs at no cost to me. I mean, really, how could I refuse?!?

Fast forward 20 days and we had another hatch on April 25! One of the 3 sloshed eggs actually formed and hatched! We named the chick Uno. It was lonely and cheeped a lot, so I gave it a stuffed chick to hang out with. 

Two days after that hatch, the 5 free eggs arrived. So, we went right back to incubating! May 19th, 4 of the 5 set eggs hatched. This clutch included two Lemon Cuckoos and two Lavender Orpingtons. So, chicken math has caused me to double my flock in an 8 week time frame! I have 8 chickens!

I'm nearly certain that we have 2 males in our original 4, but the littles are still too young to tell males from females. Welcome to chicken raising... the only animal that you can't really know 100% for certain the gender until they crow or lay an egg, around 20 weeks old! That's waiting another 11 weeks or so! Ay yi yi! 

Since we're not keeping the males, we may only end up with a handful of chickens out of this first go round, but the intermediate problem is that my coop houses 4-6 chickens. Uh oh. Time for a bigger coop, no? So we've spent our "free time" over the past 3 days building a 6x6 coop with a 14 foot run that will house up to 16 chickens. Yay! 

Remind me some time to fill you in on the chicken sanity line I crossed within the first 6 weeks of owning these dang birds... it involved an injury, wound care, hand feeding, and a chicken who's now completely content to sit on my lap and watch tv with me...