I love a good sale and find some of my best bargains from the clearance aisle. This week I stumbled upon a new (to me, at least) clearance deal. We went to the TSC store to look for chicken wire for the chicken coop Paul is building for the new chicks. The further into the store, the louder the peeping became. As it was our first time visiting this store, I was unaware that they would have chicks. Actually until just last week, I thought it was just a tractor store--I mean it's called Tractor Supply Company, right? We had to go look at the chicks. I would have been fine just looking, but they had chicks marked down to $1/each, and they were pullets! They had little tiny cute bundles of fluff at regular price (from $2-$3/each) but these guys were just a little older and a little less cute in comparison with those downy little bundles. And they had them priced at a dollar each. Normally over $3 for pullets (that's young hens--not roosters). How could I pass this deal up? It turned out I couldn't. We brought home another dozen...
They are very close in age to the chicks we hatched out, so we put them all in the same tote. Not sure what breed these new ones are, but most likely some kind of sex-link chicken. Meaning the females hatch one color and males another, making it really easy to tell apart chicks upon hatching. I've got one or two that are very light in color and hoping they aren't roosters, but time will tell. As to the older chicks, we are watching them closely for clues to gender since they were purchased as straight run. Barred rock pullets supposedly have a smaller white dot on their heads and darker legs, so we used that to pick them out. But we knew this wasn't 100% accurate and it appears we have a rooster in the bunch. His comb is getting red and his wattles are visible and red. Plus his barring (stripes) are much more apparent than the other three which is apparently a sign of rooster-i
shness. (
That's a word, right?) But that's not too bad considering straight run is 50/50 roosters to hens. So it looks like we have 3 hens and 1 rooster on the Barred Rocks. The Rhode Island Reds look like they are probably 2 and 2. But we didn't have any sort of way to tell them apart and we wanted roosters from those.
It's still hard to tell on the banties and the chicks we hatched out. We're thinking the little tiny black banty is a girlie. Up in the air on the others and waiting a bit long for more signs to become obvious. The ones we hatched are about a week to week and a half younger than the original ones we bought. They do tons of growing week to week. So there is huge disparity in sizes.
I will be doing my best to stay away from feed stores with chicks now. We have 29 chicks in our laundry room! The constant chorus of peeping is kind of cute, though. And it's so fun watching them grow. Once they are outside, though, all bets are off again! I'm really itching to give the incubator another run, and I'm thinking guineas.
This evening Paul and I walked up to check on our newly planted garden. As we were getting ready to walk back down to the house, we noticed a rather large snapping turtle in the grass. Paul was concerned about it raiding the garden, so he attempted to roll it back down the hill toward the pond with a pair of post hole diggers. I was surprised to see it such a ways from the water and stepped forward to see what it was doing.
Turns out it was a lady turtle, and she had climbed out of the pond to lay her eggs. She had laid quite a few of them down into a tight little hole. It was very interesting to see, and something I had never seen before. The eggs are quite small, a little smaller than ping-pong balls which they resembled. We took one egg from the nest to check it out. The shell isn't hard like a chicken's egg shell, but is kind of leathery. She seemed to be making her way back towards the nest when we left her alone. I felt bad for disturbing her on her nest, but then again, we really don't need a whole new slew of snappers heading into the pond. She was quite a biggie herself--close to a foot and a half across her back and a big strong jaw. They have a lightning quick bite, but don't really move terribly fast as long as you are out of range of their immediate bite area.
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