After an exciting day with guests aged 2 to 85, and cooperative brick-oven construction I gave a hen away. I hope it wasn't this hen, but when my brick-oven buddy agreed to take on of the really Silky-looking Silky roosters from Kagoshima (just luck they didn't become soup last Monday,those Boris [hy-line?] Brown hens saved them!!) it just seemed appropriate to send a hen along too. Hopefully the rooster and hen will get along well and they will care for the 4 Silky/JiDokKo mix chicks they will be joining.. I'd like to see the birds keep laying eggs up in this planter among the lemon-grass blades.. Hopefully a crow won't get the eggs, the planter won't fall down.. One of the JiDokKo birds as started laying in a box by the front door. That's convenient! Other birds keep laying by the two broody hens. One is sitting over 6 eggs.. Some are over 3 weeks old but I don't really know which.. I have to start marking them now with the more recent broody hen.. Sometimes they abandon the eggs to run out and eat with the other birds.. I guess they know when it's warm enough to do that because some eggs hatch in spite of occasional abandonment..

#SilkyHen #烏骨鶏雌鶏

Maron studiously ignoring adult birds.. but licks her chops and can't avoid a murderous attraction to the smaller chicks...

#MaronTheShiba #SilkyChickens #SilkyHen #JidoriChicks #烏骨鶏 #烏骨鶏雌鶏 #柴犬 #地鶏雛 #じどっこ雛

Lucky JiDoKko chick.. The hen this chick's egg was under had started moving away from her eggs after the first SIlky chick.. I was thinking to dispose of the remaining 3 JidoKKo eggs but was busy. Then a JiDokKo rooster chick appeared, against all odds. So I was thinking to dispose of the remaining 2 eggs but thought I'd give them 1 more day under another hen.. Two day later this JiDokKo hen chick appears, Lucky!! So much of life is lucky chance, I guess. With incubators high humidity settings and temperatures seem to be very important but the hens seem to be able to move away from the eggs, even on brisk days and come back and somehow usher healthy(?I hope) chicks out of their shells.. Maybe the hens know when and how to help break the chicks out to breathe?
#JiDokKOChick #SilkyHen #じどっこ雛

Days old Jidori heirloom cihcks with a mothering Sillky hen.. One of the hens was staying on the eggs tat never got beyond the liquid stage, so I replaced the eggs on the 19th... Eventually it would be nice if the hens decided on one place to be a permanent brooding box for eggs, then moved to another box when one of them decides to take care of chicks instead of warming eggs.. If there were always one or two at each stage there would be no need to use electricity to hatch eggs with an incubator or warm chicks with heat lamps at night.. "Creator Spirit" (Paul Goodman on writing, art..) come... Maybe I'll get an epiphany about how to set up a rotation like that..

#JidoriChicks #SilkyHen #地鶏雛 #宮崎地鶏雛 #烏骨鶏雌鶏

Silky Chick rasied along with Jidori Hen chick.. They had a Jidori Rooster chick brother till Tuesday or so but that adventurous little bird must have wandered off too far from the mother hen and gotten eaten by the cute dog or a street cat... The Owl Meet (ふくろうの会) people told me the Jidori are fighting birds so that rooster would have ended up as somebody's meal after getting big enough to cause havoc in the yard anyway. But still it would have been nice to see a happy full grown rooster for a while...
#SilkyChick #SilkyHen #JidoriChick #MiyazakiJidori #烏骨鶏雛 #烏骨鶏雌鶏 #宮崎地鶏 #地鶏雛

Prune the maternal Silky hen with some recently hatched Miyazaki Jidori Hen chicks..

#SilkyHen #JidoriChicks #JidoriHenChicks #烏骨鶏雌鶏 #地鶏雛 #地鶏雌鶏雛 #宮崎地鶏雛

It's fascinating to follow the changes in the colors and patterns on the Miyazaki Jidori (or Jidokko, some sort of local heirloom bird, maybe mixed in with other heirloom) birds. These three chicks, the Silky, the Jidori rooster, and the Jidori hen all being together helps get started with comparisons. The Jidori chicks seem to grow a lot faster, and the Jidori rooster seems the most adventurous as in running around far from the mother hen. The Jidori hen was a lot more pro-active about eating the wriggling worms I threw to them.. But the Silkies seem to have preferences too. It might just be an individual taste thing, some birds like worms, some don't.. I read about research on coyote poop that seemed to show a diversity of individual tastes among coyotes.. For better or worse, not many seem to like eating feral cats, the outside cats probably need a natural predator so the wild birds and a lot of other species get a better chance of avoiding extinction. I wonder if this set up with locking the birds up at night would work with coyotes the way it tends to work with the weasels, badgers, and tanuki around here...

#SIlkyHen #JidoriChicks #SilkyChick #烏骨鶏雌鶏 #地鶏雛 #烏骨鶏雛

Miyazaki Jidori heirloom hen chick Silky brooding hen mother.. The chick's sister was dead, looked a bit flattened, in the corner the other morning. This one seems to be doing ok though.. This hen chick hatched a few days, maybe a week, after the other one..

#宮崎地鶏 #地鶏雛 #MiazakiJidori #JidoriChick #JidoriHenChick #BackyardChickens #烏骨鶏雌鶏 #烏骨鶏 #SilkyHen #

One morning 2 or 3 chicks made their way through the wire mesh and out of the cage and were out on their own. Lucky no cats were about. The hen was all anxious and pacing inside, probably disturbing her 2 peer hens in there brooding eggs. After a busy day it's easy to forget about adjusting the mesh overlaps so the chicks can't fit through the holes. You're just glad you remembered to close up the cages at all.. Eventually some sort of more sage-like system will have to come about, like a dog that can be trusted not to eat the chicks, or a nested fencing situation.

Now that I think of it, the egg-farmer that put his dog in the chicken cages at night probably only did it for big cages with 80 adult birds. I'll have to ask him. If Maron gets knocked up I'll have to be intensive about having the puppies hanging out with chicks a lot.. Maybe I can still train Maron to live with chicks??

#BackyardChickens #SilkyHen #JidoriChick #SilkyChick #烏骨鶏雌鶏 #烏骨鶏雛 #宮崎地鶏雛

Chicks ❤️ love ❤️ maggots.

#SilkyChick #JidoriChick #SilkyHen #烏骨鶏 #烏骨鶏雌鶏 #烏骨鶏雛 #地鶏雛 #宮崎地鶏 #宮崎地鶏雛 #MiyazakiJidori #MiyazakiJidoriChick