Chicken mystery

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Something weird is going on with our chickens. Stephen noticed the other day that we have a Rhode Island Red rooster that we didn’t have before. What makes it really weird is that we’re missing a Delaware hen.

Nobody around here that we know of has Reds or Delawares. Our neighbors have chickens, but they’re game birds and look nothing like our chickens.

On the flip side, we ordered 15 more Americauna/Araucana cross chickens and 15 more Rhode Island Red birds. We’ve been wanting to transition to all one breed, and since most of our birds now are the Reds, this will get us a lot closer. We ordered several breeds two years ago, but we just keep coming back to the Reds because they’re such a good multi-purpose bird.

Eventually what we’ll do is have the Reds all together in one pen, and my Americauna/Araucana in another. We have space for three separate enclosures if we needed it, so that’s not a problem. Right now all the adult birds are in the biggest pen (we’d really prefer free range but don’t feel like that’s an option right now). The small pen has the babies we hatched in November. They’re not really babies any more, but they’re not old enough to lay. We separated them so they wouldn’t eat the laying mash. It made a massive difference in egg production once we took the non-laying birds out! When they get closer to laying age, we’ll put them back with the adults.

We also have 6 quail and 15 chicken eggs in the incubator. The quail are supposed to hatch tomorrow, and the chickens on Monday.

But I’d still like to figure out how we have one less hen and one extra rooster. I would think that we just guessed gender wrong – but a white she turning into a red he after two years. . .not likely! It’s weird.