Contrite

Um. Yeah.

So I'm just bad at blogging.

I meant to write weekly, but this summer's gotten away from me. And now I head back to college on Thursday, and I certainly won't be writing then.

Alas, maybe next year.

But I thought I would check in with a quick update, in case anyone in cyber space is reading my silly little blog.

Hatching picked up since June, and I'm currently at 124 chicks and counting, although the counting's liable to come to an end soon. There are 9 fertile eggs in the hatcher due any day now. After that there are just two more batches of eggs in the bator, and most of those were laid after my boys dropped their feathers, so who knows if they're any good. Not the 200 my father was hoping for, but honestly I have no idea where 200 birds would go, so I'm not so depressed. We did better than last year, and this still leaves us plenty of room for improvement in the future.

High points of the season:

• Chick diversity: Instead of just the mutt blue and spalding birds of the past two summers, this year I hatched Opals, Purples, Purple Blackshoulders, Cameos, Silver Pieds, Blue Pieds, Blackshoulder, Blues, Whites, White Eyeds, Emerald Spaldings--and Spalding and Spalding White Eyed mutt birds.





• My new Opal breeders from Mississippi: Claire and Charlie, the Opals I had shipped in from Mississippi last November in my stress induced internet bird buying binge, did spectacularly for me this summer, especially in June and July. From just one hen I got 11 healthy chicks--and there would have been more if we hadn't lost so many eggs during our incubation crisis.

My Spalding mutts: Jack, the Spalding mutt boy with a few white eyes, and the two Spalding hens I saved from my 2004 hatch were the only ones with a higher hatch percentage than my Opals... and boy do I have lots of second generation Spalding mutts! My white eyeds, including one mature white eyed hen I had shipped in from Brad Legg during said buying binge, shared a pen with Jack and co for half the summer, so the white eyed hen was adding some extra interest to Jack's already murky blood (I'm reasonably sure he's the offspring of my emerald boy Beo and my silver pied hen Diana, in one of those unplanned crosses back when I didn't have enough pens). Not only do a lot of Jack's chicks have some white on their wings and faces, but I got two silver pieds and a pied from him as well. For awhile, I almost had more silver pieds from Jack than my two silver pied pairs. Which leads me to

Disappointments of the season:

• I got one baby out of my eldest silver pied trio, and it was a white eyed. I'm not sure what was up with Zues. I didn't get a single fertile egg out of his pen until the hatch two weeks ago--there was 3 or 4. And 1 hatched. And it pretty much looks like that is that. I dunno what he was doing all summer.


• Beo (my emerald) had screwy fertility as well. Emmie (his emerald gal) had a fertile first clutch, but in our chilled incubator mess we were only able to hatch one. She laid blanks for about two months, and then had a 4 or 5 egg fertile clutch, from which one egg hatched. So we only got two emeralds. And Zues may never have been that fertile, but I know Beo has been. That's how I got so many Spalding mutts in the first place!



• The pair of whites and the one eyed blue pied boy I bought locally last fall didn't give me any chicks. Fertility was low, but occasional--we could just never get those eggs to hatch. The white hen did not lay much, and she liked to crack them when she did. I also had a tramautic bee sting incident while feeding them right after vacation that left me with a swollen face for almost two days. The blue pied, Mikhail (after the one-eyed Russian Other on Lost) is a gorgeous boy, kinda gross empty eye-socket aside. I plan on selling the white male so Mik can be alone with the girls next year. We had to take the white pair, but I really only wanted the girl. I had a buyer for the boy, but in all my being away at college and my dad's business hecticness we've seemed to have lost the woman's phone number, so I guess I'll have to look for someone else--shouldn't be hard. But I'd love to sell him before his train makes him too hard to move. I've also moved one of my yearling pied hens into that pen. She's a beauty, and not at all related to this boy, and I'm hoping once she's old enough she'll lay better than that white.

There's been plenty more going on here this summer: pen building episodes, cleaning meltdowns, smelly houses and angry siblings, hatching joys and woes, the miraculous recovery of a chick with a curved neck (I will have to write about that sometime, either here or on my main site), a futile war against flies, and preperations to start shipping. It's been a good summer overall, and I have tons of birds to sell, and I shall miss them all dearly once I depart for the land of academia. But not gonna lie. I'm not going to miss cleaning up peachick feces.

But my parents are going to miss me.