Our girls and boys old and new....part 1

Today I wanted to introduce you to our boys and girls that have been or are still living in the Pecker Palace....we have had many birds come and go...some from dying of natural causes others from having had a too close of an encounter with either Gus (our premier chicken killer), Bogus or Otis....you haven't even met Otis yet...but he will be introduced at a later date.
We have also been giving some of out girls and boys away, to friends and family when they wanted to get going on chicken keeping, it is addicting you know...having these little funny critters.

But before that you have to see a picture of our first egg...boy the kids were happy when they found this in the nesting boxes...this is not our first "first" egg, remember they laid one on the way home from our evacuation from IKE, the menacing hurricane ..but this is our first laid in the actual Pecker Palace. Sofia was holding it so gingerly as if it was about to break at any given moment..but come to find out.."homegrown" eggs have a much harder shell than the store bought once do. You can drop them on the ground and they would bounce..not break

This is Duchess, the hen that laid that first egg..her name was Duke at first as we were convinced she was a cockerel..but nope she is a Duchess..
She is a Buff Orpington and that is definitely my favorite breed, we have had a slew of different breeds, but I always come back to these..they look like butterballs out in the field when they are free ranging and I just adore that....

This is Viola, named after one of my grandmother's sisters..but we call her "crocked beak" or hairlip, as her jaws are miss aligned, so her top beak goes to the right and her bottom one goes to the left..usually these hens starve to death as it is very hard for them to eat, but she is our oldest hen to date and she is holding her own...We do baby her somewhat, with extra scraps or a deeper bowl to eat out of so she can get more food in her. She is an Australorp.

This is Helga, she is also an Australorp and she is like hell on wheels..I would not want to meet her in a dark alley, if you know what I mean.
She always had to sit on the top perch, which in poultry lingo means "I am the BOSS"...so here she is sitting on her favorite high perch...the roof of the Pecker Palace..not one other hen tried that ever..                


This goofy looking fella is Vida Blue..he is young here, in that weird teenager looking stage..although we didn't even know he was a rooster until he crowed....
He is a Giant Blue Cochin...oddball 




This is Vida Blue once he is fully grown..he is a stunner isn't he?
He ended up breaking his leg at one point and I babied him and made a "chicken sling" and had him in our bathroom in it for 6 weeks before his leg was all healed..but he did it..

This is Little Miss Muffet, she is a Partridge Cochin, although I think she might have been a bantam (a smaller version than the standard), as she was much smaller than Vida Blue.

She is the only hen we've had that went broody on us, meaning sat on eggs until they hatched...out of her broodiness we got two roosters, Spring and Guld...
Spring was later given to friends, Guld is still with us today..pictures to come, he is stunning just like his father Vida was.

This is Summer, she is a Barred Rock/Ameraucana. She looked like a Barred Rock hen, but layed olive green eggs, a trait from Amerecaunas.
She is the mother of Spring, the rooster hatched under Little Miss Muffet.
He was striped just like her, but had feather legs just like his father.

This is Grace, she is one of the two Welsummers we had, the other one was Calloway..they were both named after the two cows in the children's movie " Home on the Range"..why?  Because just like those two cows..these two girls chatted up a storm, all the time..so Grace and Calloway it was.

They both laid really dark brown eggs, almost like chocolate covered eggs.
Ventura really like dark brown egg layers, so these were his favorites..among a few more.

This is a normal day the Palace..traffic jam by the nesting boxes...

Not an uncommon scene either..each hen has a favorite box to lay in and that very box might be another hens favorite laying box as well...