automated chicken door & egg hatching

I took pictures of the "baby" chickens- who are now bigger than the older ones. It is so interesting to see how the different breeds mature.

And how about this guy(?) we thing he might be a rooster as he has been bigger than the rest since he got here. No definitive proof yet. We love the beards they are developing, not a good picture for that here, but most of the aracaunas have them.

Here it is- the up & running automated chicken door! Just flick the switch & up it goes. I don't think the chickens are impressed, but I am. We have plans to make it automated do it will go up and down on its own- but we need different parts (I believe).

We put two eggs into the incubator the kids got for Christmas. We have candled them and could have, possibly, we don't really know, might have seen something. We put them in on the 30th and the 31st- so about 21 days will put us around Feb 20th. We don't even know who is laying now, so I can't wait to see what happens.

All is quiet

Not much new with the chickens these days. Yesterday we got a heated water bucket, finally. The winter weather here is usually relatively mild. Not this year, its been record breaking cold I bet. So I never thought we would need a heated bucket, but their water has frozen solid more than once. I have had to bring it up to the house to thaw it and refill for them. The good news is that it is a five gallon bucket, so it will last longer now too. We were afraid it would be too high for them to get their heads into it, so we surrounded it with hay. All set!

I got my first McMurray catalogue in the mail yesterday. Wow! It is something to look through their stock on line, but it is very different to flip through page after page of birds. I saw the pheasants, they really are beautiful. But when I read they had to be ordered in multiples of 30 I thought maybe we weren't quite ready for that yet. I really want a peacock, and they only need to bought in multiples of 8. Maybe...

PS- At the end of the day when Adam went down to close up their door (which isn't necessary to open anyway because they won't even step out the door when there is snow on the ground) he said the water in the bucket was steaming. crazy!
And the linear actuator came in the mail today too- unfortunately it seems to have taken apart and incorrectly put back together with a missing screw.

BackYardChickens post & sophisticated chicken coop

This is the link to Adam's post on back yard chickens:

http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=99668&p=17

I'll be pretty impressed when we have a chicken door that can open & close by itself!

all living in peace

It's been over a week since we moved the little chickens into the big coop. You could barely tell that they are different ages by now. The group of "little ones" still move together in a pack, both ri reds & aracaunas together.

The biggest problem we have been having is because of the weather. It has been cold enough for the snow to keep around for a while and the chickens don't like to go out in the snow. There is no point to it I guess, as they wouldn't be able to find much thru the snow anyway. But the little ones like to roost during the day. And since the coop is full, they have been roosting in the nesting boxes, 5 at a time as you can see- I told you they go as a pack. So the boxes are full of poop, and whoever is still laying ( I think it's only one of them) has to lay on the ground sometimes.

Adam cleaned it all out yesterday, because the other problem is it stinks in there now. But I noticed today the nesting boxes were full of poop again. He was shooing them out of the boxes yesterday. I wonder if there is a better way to manage this problem.