New additions

Those of you who follow this blog and have good memories, may recall that last year’s attempt to hatch out our own chicks didn’t go very well. Our Chantecler hens went broody, and incubated their eggs, but then didn’t seem to know what to do with the chicks once they hatched, so the chicks died. We ended up raising the two surviving chicks under a heat lamp, and they turned out to be roosters. So I planned to acquire a Bantam hen, because it is commonly agreed in the farming community that “bantams are good mothers”. Bantams are not a distinct breed, but rather the “miniature” version of standard-sized breeds, sort of like miniature poodles, but unlike miniature poodles, they seem to retain more of the “wild” bird characteristics, including foraging and broodyness – I hope.

On Saturday I went to the Inter-provincial Bird Association‘s bi-annual auction. They were selling not only all kinds of chickens, ducks, geese, pheasants, and pigeons, but also all kinds of pet birds from canaries to parrots and exotics such as peacocks. And for some reason rabbits… Since my experience is limited to our own Chanteclers, I looked at everything that was on offer, and felt kind of at sea. Most of the bantam chickens for sale were fancy breeds that I wasn’t familiar with, and not what I was looking for. Hoping for the best I bid on, and won, a trio of “Bantam hens” – no breed or age listed on the little descriptive ticket attached to their box, for the sum of $15. The box they were sold in is a regular cardboard box with a big window cut into one side and chicken wire fastened over it. This is so you can inspect the chickens you plan to bid on, and so that they get air and light.

So I brought them home, installed the box in a corner of the coop, and then opened up the well-taped top to give them food & water. I used our baby chick feeder & waterer, which they promptly knocked over, so I had to re-fill. Then I closed, but did not re-tape the top of the box. My plan was to leave them in their box inside the coop for 24 hours for them to get used to their new environment and for our flock to get used to the sight / smell / sound of them, to help them integrate into the flock without incident. However, when I went to close up the coop that evening, the three banties had escaped from the box and were sitting up on the roosts with the rest of the chickens.

From their characteristics, two of them (the two with the blue, yes blue earlobes and blueish-greyish legs) are  probably Ameraucana/Silkie crosses, and the third (the one in the middle) could be anything. The interesting thing about Ameraucana chickens is that they lay blue/green eggs! These are the two our new chickens have laid so far, next to two of our regular Chantecler eggs for comparison:

Fun, yes? I’m beginning to understand how people get drawn in to the world of fancy chicken breeds, because I’m a lot more excited about these miniature chickens that lay blue eggs than I expected to be…

I haven’t yet managed to get a picture of the banties next to the Chanteclers for a size comparison. They’re not quite that well integrated into the flock yet. I don’t know if we’ll be keeping all three. One of my neighbors asked me to buy her a mating pair of banties at the auction, if they were going cheap. I didn’t find a pair going cheap for her, but she may want one of the three hens I bought. I’m thinking I might want to keep two of them, because the plan is to have them sit on & hatch & raise Chantecler chicks for us, and looking at the size of the banty hens, I can’t imagine them being able to sit on more than a half-dozen eggs at a time!