Free Rangin'

We are loving the country life! It definitely keeps you on your toes with extra chores and wildlife to manage in and out of the house. This guy has been keeping us company in the kitchen lately. You can tell he was watching me when I took this picture from the reflection of his wee beady eye. That's about 4-5 inches across for scale. He's not poisonous though so we let him be.

Some of the more welcome visitors are the family of roos that like to bask in the sunny yard.

The weather is getting cooler so I'll need to refine my fire-building skills again. I also had a near catastrophe a couple days ago when we had some power failure. We live at the end of the electric line so I guess it isn't uncommon to have trouble. Normally it would have been fine, but I've been incubating chicken eggs and the outage came just as the fourth chick was breaking out of its egg!

We've got a big barn with a few coops sitting empty, a laying hen and a studly rooster and I thought it would be nice to build up the flock a bit. And what a great chance to learn to hatch chicks! When I get onto something I really go for it and so I learned everything I could about raising chickens, incubation and chick growth. I had to restrain myself to one in ten comments about chicken development when Brian got home at the end of each day. It really is a miracle though- 21 days from egg to chick. I collected eggs from our hen to incubate. She lays one a day. It's a little later each day until after a month or so she skips a day and starts over early the next day. I thought it was very thoughtful of her to rest from laying on Good Friday. Here is the Easter egg! Hailey and I had a little hunt for it.

We started out with 7 eggs incubating and added one more the next morning that I watched our hen lay and quickly popped it in with the others. Luckily because the other 3 eggs of hers in there ended up not being fertilized! I had 4 eggs from the woman who I rented the incubator from. All 4 of hers were fertilized. Guess our rooster is a bit lazy! Here are the proud parents of one beautiful chick:

You can check the eggs as they develop through a process called candling- using a bright light in the dark to see through the shells. Here's a fuzzy photo where you can see a beak or tail, not sure, but it was moving, so that's good.

 Just under 21 days later and all 5 of our chicks hatched! The power luckily came back on an hour later and they were fine. I was frantic though- boiling water and putting hot water bottles around the incubator wrapped in blankets to keep them warm. Our little flock:

Pip - first to hatch, tall and confident. Seems to be the ring leader. We think he's probably a rooster.

Kashmir - baby of our chickens, shy and sweet, fluffy

Bette Davis - if it's a boy, just Davis with beautiful eyes

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The best chick of all!