Chicken Hotel

Most of you know that I have chickens.  This fall I "culled the flock" as a lot of my hens were getting kind of old (two years is the peak production for laying hens and most of mine were at least three), leaving myself just about a dozen.  With all that extra space in the coop why not open a Chicken Hotel?!  Family friends decided to take a trip to India for the months of January and February.  We normally watch their dog Annie when they go on trips; this time I get to babysit their chickens as well!  (Haha, I know, "sucker" is written across my forehead!)  So, the first week in January I went over to their place and picked up their flock of a couple dozen chickens and brought them home.  These are not just run-of-the-mill chickens, mind you.  They are fancy rare breed and banty hens.  They are so cute especially the tiny banty hens, although, their equally tiny eggs do not exactly seem practical to me.  I hope my "guests" are find their accommodations to their liking!

   A good layer!

Fluffy!

This little guy thinks he rules the roost!

Enjoying breakfast!

It is nice to have these guest chickens right now since the small flock I had left was laying next to nothing. (I was really wondering why I hadn't just sent them all to the stew pot!)  What will I do when my visitors leave, you ask?  Never fear--I had a whole new batch of chicks arrive mid-December!  Hens will start laying at about five months, so these should be ready to produce along about May.  Chicks need to be kept very warm, so raising them in the winter seems like risky business.  However, my good friend Travis lent me his nice brooder, which has kept them nice and cozy.  Here they are at about a week old:

As you can see they are so cute and fluffy! 

Now, here they are about five weeks later--much bigger and a lot less cute.  They have definitely outgrown their brooder space!

So, today I had to "graduate" them from the brooder to a larger space.  This is a lot more difficult than it sounds because I have to keep them separate from the larger hens and they still need heat to keep them warm.  I decided the best way to do this was to take some old wire from the scrap pile and section off a corner of the coop and hang heat lamps from the ceiling.  It was a rather tricky job to do by myself, but I managed to construct a rather ramshackle partition for them.  Tonight and tomorrow will be a true test of how well this will work because it is supposed to be really cold.  I'm a little worried that my two heat lamps won't keep them warm enough.  I'll keep you posted as to their progress!