Carol's Chickens

My girls are looking beautiful after their moult. The only thing left now is for Peaches and Barley’s combs to get big and red again in the spring. All the girl’s feathers are stunning though.

I am going to put out some portraits that I have taken over the last couple of days in their pecking order.

Topaz

Topaz has always remained firmly at the top of the pecking order. She keeps all the girls in order and none of them dare to contest her.

I think she is getting ready to lay again. She has been very vocal and has been checking out the nest box. I know she has been in them because only Butterscotch is laying at the moment and she doesn’t disturb the shavings but just settles on top of them. Lately though the boxes have had deep wells in them with shavings scratched down the ramp and Topaz has had tell tale shavings on her fluffy bottom.

Honey

Honey is second in command and is our eldest girl at three years of age. This actually shows on her now as she is plumper than she used to be and sits down more often. Recently all the girls were stood in a close group and Honey was the only one sitting down, right in the middle of them.

Butterscotch

Butterscotch used to be below Peaches and Barley in the pecking order but she seems to have gradually worked her way up and I think she is now above them. She is full of confidence and only Topaz and Honey ever give her a peck these days to keep her in her place.

She is still laying at the moment but no doubt will go broody again soon. She is always last to bed at night. The other girls all go to roost about half an hour before the automatic door shuts but Butterscotch will still be casually drifting around from the food dish to the water to the grit, to peck at the shavings and back again, then suddenly she decides it’s time to go in and briskly marches to the shed and straight up to the perch about ten minutes before the door closes.

Jackie noticed yesterday that her beak has a blue tinge similar to the blue of her lobes. I looked back at older photos of her and realised that her beak had always had a blue tinge but I hadn’t really noticed it before.

Toffee

Since Toffee’s moult she has some feathers around her neck with a slightly green sheen to them. One of Toffee’s characteristics is that every day when the treat of corn or sunflower hearts runs out she makes a real sound of complaint. As soon as we hear this sound we know the corn has all gone. She marches around complaining for a few minutes and does this without fail every day.

Emerald

Emerald has such beautiful glossy, shimmering feathers. This pose with one foot on the food dish is very typical of her. One of her habits is to come and scratch in the shavings every morning when I poop pick the shed. It’s as if the open door is just too tempting for her. Every morning I end up scooping a pile of shavings back into the shed. As soon as I hear the scratching behind my back I know that it will be Emerald.

Peaches and Barley

Peaches and Barley are absolutely inseparable so I had to take their portrait together, Peaches is on the left and Barley on the right. They do everything together and I have been taking photos of them during the last week to do a post on their total togetherness. If we ever lost one of these girls it would be a terrible shock to the one left.

They are constantly chatting or “squeaking” as I call it. They still love to jump on my back if ever I bend over and ride on my back while I clean up the run.

Speckles

At last Speckles is no longer nervous around me but she is still wary of the other girls as she is firmly bottom girl. The only one she has no fear of is Toffee and Toffee will run from her. Speckles seemed to sense early on that Toffee is a nervous sort of a girl too and while she remains above the flock mates that have never contested her place in the pecking order she never managed to put Speckles in a place below her. I am glad that Speckles has one girl that isn’t above her as she takes some stick from the rest of them. She is very speedy though and manages to get out of the way.

So there we have our beautiful eight girls and all of them so full of character and with their own funny little ways. I am so happy with how lovely our flock are together.

Today Jackie and I met up to visit each other’s girls before Christmas. The last time we met up was a few weeks ago when Blossom was heavily going through the moult and looking quite shabby. Today she is looking much better and has her tail back.

Chelsea and Blossom at the patio doors

Chelsea comes in for her close up

Chelsea, Blossom and Bluebell

Blossom has a full tail again

Jackie handed me Chelsea for a cuddle

It was so lovely to catch up today and we both agreed that both our flocks are looking lovely. Chelsea is such a friendly girl and it makes a change for me to hold a big girl. It was a lovely afternoon.

Yesterday at about mid day I heard what I think of as the egg shout. I was surprised because only Butterscotch is laying and she had laid late in the afternoon yesterday so this would be too early for her.

On inspection it was Topaz making all the noise. She was being very vocal and was looking in the little coop nest boxes. Her comb and wattles are also a lovely red colour. I wonder if she is about to start laying again. It seemed a bit early but I looked back at last year’s egg record and she started laying on the eighteenth of January so it’s only a month earlier.

Topaz has a lovely red comb and wattles

Topaz is being very vocal and is looking in peak condition

I love the way the other girls in the background are all looking at her as if wondering what all the noise is about.

She is walking around the little coop nest boxes and shouting

She is having a good old shout in between pecking at the shavings

Topaz is my anomaly. She laid six eggs in her first year and eight eggs in her second year. The rest of the time she plays at being broody but doesn’t commit to it. She likes to sit on other girls eggs and stops laying herself.

In her first summer she started laying in June. She laid one egg on the twenty third of June and another on the twenty seventh of June. She laid one egg on the second of July. She then laid another egg on the ninth of August and then again on the eleventh of August. She laid her final, sixth egg, on the eleventh of September. Soon after that she started her moult.

This year she was the first to start laying again. Hurrah! I thought. She laid her first egg on the eighteenth of January then another on the twentieth and then on the twenty seventh of January. She laid again on the fifth, twelfth, fifteenth and twenty third of February. She then laid her final, eighth egg, on the third of March.

That was it for Topaz. She didn’t lay again all summer and once again started to moult at the beginning of September.

I was so surprised when she didn’t lay any more last year but this year I won’t be surprised. In fact I would actually be surprised if she did lay more than one clutch. With all my research I have never come across another hen like Topaz. She is unique. Some people complain that their broody girls don’t lay much but Topaz is exceptional. Not laying much doesn’t quite go far enough. But there you have it, she is my unique girl and we will just have to wait and see if she remains the same this time round. I suspect she will!

This year we have an exceptionally busy Christmas so I have had to be much more organised than usual.

Tonight we have our annual get together of twenty friends. We all club together to cover the cost and we are supplying the mains and desserts (being the caterers) and another couple are hosting at their house and getting in the booze and doing a cheese board. They are supplying bed and breakfast for some of the couples and we are supplying bed and breakfast for one couple (dear friends from Dorset).

We are all meeting up tomorrow for a pub lunch before everyone goes on their way again. Some of the friends are far flung and this is an annual chance for us all to meet up and catch up with each other. Tomorrow we also have to fit in preparing Monday’s lunches.

Next Saturday we have a wedding for a hundred and fifty people, this has been booked since the spring. We are doing an afternoon tea on our vintage crockery then they will have a hog roast in the evening. This means a lot of time leading up to it will be spent getting everything ready. We also have a lunch for twenty on the same day which I will deliver in the morning and it will be going into their fridge until later.

A few days before Christmas we are doing the full turkey Christmas dinner and all the trimmings for my husbands family (and exchanging and opening gifts) and on the same morning we are delivering a finger buffet for a hundred for a memorial service (which we will have prepared the day before).

We will then do the whole  turkey Christmas dinner again a few days after Christmas for my family (along with exchanging and opening gifts) and have also had a party enquiry for that day too.

With all this going on I needed to get ahead of the game so I started Christmas shopping earlier than usual and by the first week of December I had bought and wrapped all the gifts, written all the cards and posted everything that needed to be posted.

All that remained was to get the Christmas tree and decorate the house. Yesterday afternoon we bought a tree and I set about decorating it.

We have a Christmas tree

The lights are on and the fairy is on the top

The tree is decorated

The final touch, the gifts are under the tree

It looks a lot of gifts but it is for all our family including the grandchildren. Now we are ready for Christmas! We have a lot of work to squeeze in over the Christmas period but the house is ready.

Butterscotch is my star winter egg layer. She laid at first light this morning after missing a day yesterday. For a bantam girl her eggs are a good size. They are only fractionally smaller than a medium shop bought egg.

Butterscotch’s egg

A medium shop bought egg on the left and Butterscotch’s egg on the right. Thank you Butterscotch.

I have done a few posts on getting the bedtime perches to the right height. I knew there was a problem when I went out to the girls at first light and the automatic door was open but none of the girls had yet come out.

I realised they were struggling to get down from the perches in the restricted space and were not using the ladder as I had expected them too. Never expect them to do what you think they should do!

Since we took out the ladder and lowered the perches they have gone back to squeezing under the door as soon as it starts to rise which I have photographed recently.

I thought I would continue looking at this habit a bit further. They come out so quickly that I knew they must have already jumped down from the perch and were crowding behind the door waiting for it to open. I decided to open the big door a little and shove my camera in and try to capture them behind the door. Once again the photos are not great because I can’t really see what I am going to get as if I open the door a little bit more they will all squeeze through the smallest gap just as they squeeze under the pop hole. They are so eager to get out.

You have to make allowances for a night time’s worth of poop under the perches. I like to keep the shed clean and don’t like poop in photos but to get this early morning shot I had to put up with the mess being on show.

I thought I would start with the night time line up. I have taken a photo on each of the last three nights. The pattern seems to be that as it’s got colder they prefer to all perch on the back perch rather than the perches on either side.

None of the girls seek out being next to each other except for Peaches and Barley. Sometimes as they are bumping around and sorting out their positions I can hear Peaches and Barley making a sound that is almost like crying, a tiny whimpering sound. I would look in thinking that they were being pecked (some of the girls, in fact mainly Peaches and Barley give poor Speckles a hard time at bedtime) but no, it was simply that either Peaches or Barley couldn’t find a space next to her soul mate. They would sound upset if they couldn’t perch next to each other. Honestly, they are like children at times!

Bedtime three nights ago

Peaches and Barley have managed to get next to each other at the expense of Emerald being pushed off of the favoured back perch. I love how the girls look at each other.

Bedtime two nights ago

Peaches and Barley didn’t manage to get next to each other on this evening. This was when I could hear the whimpering because there was no space next to Barley so Peaches had to settle for grabbing the remaining space between Toffee and Emerald.

Last night’s bedtime line up

Last night all was quiet during the bedtime routine because Peaches and Barley had bagged their spot next to each other and all the girls had managed a spot on the favoured back perch, hurrah! Still love how the girls look at each other.

This morning the automatic door still wasn’t open at quarter to eight. It was raining heavily and still quite dark. I opened the main door a crack and stuck my camera in. I have included all of the photos that I took.

Behind the door

Toffee, on the right, looks as if she has just landed down from the perch.

We want to come out

Hurrah! The door is open

Lets get out of here

It was so dark out in the run that I gave them a sprinkle of sunflower hearts on the patio so that they didn’t need to go out in the dark. It made no difference though. As soon as the sunflower hearts were gone they were off out into the run.

A sprinkle of sunflower hearts on the patio

Although they perch up well before dark they are always willing to come out in the morning in low light. They obviously know that at night it will get darker and they need to get in before that happens but in the morning it will only get lighter so they are happy to come out as soon as possible.

Their enthusiasm to get out as quickly as possible makes me smile but then again it is understandable after a long night of being shut in. Once again I have to say that I know both the girls and I are looking forward to the longer days of spring and summer.

At the weekend we visited some antique shops. We are always on the look out for bargains to add to our vintage crockery collection and we enjoy browsing the antique shops. We found a few bargains and I also found a cute egg cup for only a pound. How could I resist! I have posted before that I seem to have an unintentional egg cup collection. It’s made up of gifts and bargains such as this one.

Bargain egg cup

I keep them on the top shelf of our kitchen cabinet.

The left side of the cabinet

The right side of the cabinet

I think it fits right in.

Scrambled egg is the girls very favourite treat of all. It goes so quickly that it’s almost impossible to photograph.

I gave the girls this treat this morning. I put it in four small dishes and the only way that I can insure Speckles gets a little is to put two dishes on the patio for the girls then put two dishes further away on the wooden blocks to allow Speckles a chance at the furthest away dish.

Once again my camera struggles to click fast enough to keep up with them. I only managed these four photographs. I wanted one of Speckles at her dish but it all happened so quickly that I only have her in the background.

A scramble to get to the scrambled egg

The first two dishes are empty so the girls move on to the next dish

The two dishes on the patio are emptied in seconds and the girls move on to the third dish on the first wooden block. Speckles is eating from the fourth dish on the second wooden block. You can just see her tail in the background.

Speckles is moved away from the furthest away dish

Half the girls now move on to the fourth dish and Speckles moves away.

All four dishes are empty

The scrambled egg is all gone. If I didn’t space them like this Speckles wouldn’t get any at all and although she only had her dish to herself for a few seconds at least she got a few pecks of egg. I think we can safely say that the girls enjoyed this even if only very briefly.

Today I visited Jackie’s flock, we collected some greens from the allotment for our girls and then she visited my flock. Jackie had sent me a photo of Blossom (used to be my Bluebell) during her first really heavy moult. I had never seen her looking like this before. Jackie said it was a vast improvement from how she looked a week or so earlier.

Blossom is four years old and has laid through her first three winters without a proper break or a full moult. This winter she stopped laying and moulted big time. I took my camera with me when I took Jackie back home.

Bluebell is so shy that I struggled to get a photo of her and only managed one of her trying to escape behind a bush.

Bluebell has moulted and got her feathers back in

Blossom and Chelsea

Poor Blossom looks very shabby but it is Chelsea’s first winter and she is looking fabulous. She has a big red comb and perfect feathers.

A tatty looking Blossom

Blossom and Chelsea

They enjoy some greens while Bluebell is too shy to join in in my presence

It is so odd to see her looking like this but she does have rows of pristine tiny feathers on her back and she will soon be looking beautiful again. She also seems a lot more ginger on the front of her neck but as she was intent on eating greens I couldn’t get a shot of this.

The next photos I put on here will be of Blossom looking back to her glorious best I am sure. What these poor girls have to go through to get their new feathers! It is funny how they all moult in their own way. It was really good to have a catch up.

The days are getting noticeably shorter. Last week the automatic door was closing at quarter past four and opening at quarter past seven. Last night the door closed at four o’clock and this morning it didn’t open until quarter to eight. It was very overcast which probably made it a bit later.

I decided to go and fetch my camera and have another go at trying to catch the girls tumbling out. Again I was frustrated that my camera won’t click fast enough to keep up with the girls and I have included every shot that I got which missed half the girls exiting.

I could hear them bumping about impatiently behind the door. It seems that they pretty much come out in their pecking order with top girl Topaz being first and bottom girl Speckles being last.

Topaz is eager to make her exit

Topaz flattens herself under the door

I love the way she has to hold her wings out to make herself flatter. She can’t wait one more second until it is more comfortable.

Barley, Butterscotch and Peaches are next, followed by Honey

That’s Barleys tail in the foreground and Honey is just visible under the door.

Next out is Toffee followed by Emerald

Speckles is last

Speckles is out

This whole process only took a couple of minutes and the last girl was out just as the door was raised a third of the way up. I love this demonstration on how impatient they are to get out. I can’t blame them though as they now spend twice as long in the coop as they do out of it.

I look forward to the days getting longer again and I am sure the girls will be glad to spend less time in the coop too.