On Friday we visited a nice couple who had quite a lot of chickens. They had quite a few breeds there, and they were all interested, perky and generally fun.
I wanted to have three chickens (the house could probably take four large hens, but I don't want to test that right now!) so we were considering which three breeds to go for.
The most friendly and docile chickens were the Gingernut Rangers. These are a cross breed of chicken, the product of a Rhode Island Red and a Light Sussex. They're chickens which look like chickens. The one we picked - well, she picked us. She was scratching around and pecking my wellies, and hubby picked her up easily.
We've called her Buffy, she seems to be in charge (even though she's the smaller of the three - she is also the oldest)
A close second were the light Sussex hens. They were a bit more wary of us, but the owners were able to pick up our favourite quite quickly.
This one is Willow. She's a bit nervous of the camera noise that my iPhone was making! She settled into the run quite quickly. She doesn't seem to be the brightest of the three chickens though!
Finally we were originally thinking about getting an amber star. However, while we were there I fell in love with the Maran X that they had. We think they were Maran x Rhode Island, so she should be a similar temperament to Buffy, but maybe a bit more flightly. She's a beautiful colour, grey-blue, with a black hood.
And the perfect name for this one: Faith.
I'm sorry about the picture quality of Faith, she wasn't keen on having her photo taken, and so she's a bit blurry. She's also so dark coloured that the iPhone couldn't cope with her in those light levels!
We had put fresh newspaper and sawdust down for them on Friday, which we found they had made a right mess of, so we put fresh bedding down for them today. I think this is probably because they've been cooped up (quite literally) in the coop. Now that they have the run to wander in, they shouldn't mess the coop up quite so much.
While hubby was making lunch, I took them the end and innards from the pepper we had. They went absolutely mad for it! They also loved the mealworms we gave them to encourage them out of the coop!
I'm really excited to have chickens. It's been a dream of mine for a while. Hopefully when we get a bit more used to them we might be able to consider getting some rescue hens.
First things first though, we need to build them an extra run.
No comments:
Post a Comment