My Mistake

I have searched the chicken websites and have come up with some answers, but chicken breeds can be very confusing. I suppose that is because most chickens are mutts, variations of several different breeds mixed up together. But here is what I think that I have.

Seven of my new hens are Silver Laced Wyandottes, though a couple of them do not have rose combs, so I am assuming that they are not pure bred.

My four new barred hens are Barred Plymouth Rocks to go with my remaining two Barred Rock hens that the fox hasn't got yet. I also have two Barred Rock chicks that I think are hens but I am not certain yet, one of them is rumpless.

The three new red hens are probably Red Sexlinks, to add to my three other red hens who are Rhode Island Reds.

This leaves only one new chicken to be identified and that is Cruella, who is not a Cruella after all. I am pretty sure that she is a he, and he is a young White Crested Black Polish Rooster. I hope that I am wrong but I don't think that I am. How embarrassing!

So adding all of these up tonight, I have found that I have 8 Barred Rocks, 7 Wyandottes, 6 Red Hens, 14 Bantams and 3 Roosters, for a grand total of 38 Chickens. I think that we may have more chickens now than horses, but I would have to add all of the horses up to be sure and that would be too depressing.

Name That Chicken

Here are some pictures of my new hens. I think that I know what breeds they all are, but I am not a chicken expert. Cruella is pretty easy to identify. Can you guess who Cruella is?

I have seven of these lacy chickens:


Four of these young barred hens:


Three of these red hens:

...and only one of these:



She makes me laugh every time I look at her.

My Egg production is really up, we got 9 eggs on Tuesday and 6 yesterday. We are sure that we aren't finding all of the eggs because the new hens don't know where to lay yet. I even found one egg lying in the middle of the driveway.

They are having a hard time figuring out where to roost too. Some of them have been roosting on the tractor, some in the horse trailer, some on the spare tire or the tongue of the horse trailer, some on the kid's toy four-wheelers, Cruella even roosted on the grill one night.

Each night since they have arrived, we have had to go on a chicken hunt after dark to find them and take them to the goat/chicken shed to put them to roost out there. One of the lacy hens has totally eluded us every night, we have not been able to find her, but she always shows up the next morning. There was even one on the passenger side floorboard of my DH's mail vehicle. We had left the window open and she helped herself to a nice safe place, he was a little annoyed about the chicken poo that she left behind.