"All my pretty chickens"

The chicks are 2 weeks old now and doing well. They are growing fast and need a larger brooder, so we will be setting one up down at the chicken house soon.

Here are the chicks at one week old.
Their wing and tail feathers are coming in. The black chick at the top of the first photo has developed some crooked toes on one foot, as can be seen in the photo. I've read that little cardboard boots can be constructed for it, if you want to show the bird, but chickens can live normal lives with crooked toes, so we've chosen not to intervene. Maybe they will straighten back out on their own. In the second photo, the brownish chick standing in the center is our first hatchling- the Ameraucana female.

The chicks at 2 weeks old.
Yesterday morning I entered the nursery to find the little black guy, in the first photo, enjoying the view from atop the brooder. While I will miss having the chicks so close, it does seem that they need larger accommodations than this box. At 2 weeks, the chicks have many more feathers coming in, especially the Ameraucanas and Welsummers, which are the brownish ones. The Marans don't seem to be growing as fast and still have a lot of their baby chick fuzz. However, what most of the Marans got, that the others don't, are feathers on their legs and feet, which might be evident in some of the photos.

Well, since we hatched the eggs in the incubator, our hens in the chicken yard have basically stopped laying eggs, leaving us eggless in Deerfield. We have, like, 20 chickens, and we had to buy eggs at the farmer's market this week. How crazy is that?! Well, the chickens are molting now, which typically decreases egg production, but the chickens are also rather old (a hen died this week- the second since Jeff and I moved in), which further decreases production. This will likely continue until the winter solstice, because most breeds of chicken reduce egg production in the winter, as the days shorten. The newbies should start laying by next spring, though, and hopefully give us a more steady supply.

One last note: Dottie, the chick with the eye problem, will likely have to get along with only one functional eye. The swelling and redness went away, and she opens the affected eye now, but the eyeball protrudes somewhat from the eye socket and it is all glazed over. She's a very sweet bird, though, and she will be the second one-eyed female in our flock, with which we will try to integrate her very soon.

-Annie