And Three Became Six

I have always heard people describe how tattoos are addictive. How once you get one, one will never be enough. You'll think you are fine with what you have, and then all of the sudden you'll find yourself in a chair at a tattoo parlor/studio/shop. I for one have never experienced this, but I have chickens, and I now understand those who can't help but get another tattoo.

We were perfectly content with our three girls, and then the Winter happened, and for those who don't know, egg production slows with less daylight hours. We weren't really in the mood to play God with our chickens and provide them with artificial daylight, so we decided to get another chicken. We found a beautiful Blue Ameraucana through craigslist that I wanted to buy very much, but I read that introducing one new chicken to a flock is not likely to go very well.

So of course, we needed one more... and then we thought, well we should probably get two others. So we found someone else on craigslist who sells laying hens. They are actually the same couple we bought our first three chickens from. We picked out an Easter Egger, and a Black Australorp. They are four-month-old pullets (young hens who do not yet lay), and let me tell you, they did not want to be caught. The seller of the chickens was running around the backyard with a large fishing net trying to catch them. Definitely could have been a scene in a movie.

We introduced all three newbies at dusk when our girls were already in bed. It was pretty uneventful, but as I was washing the poo off of my hands in the sink, our Plymy was bawking at me through the window and definitely letting me know how she felt about these intruders.

There is quite a bit of noise this morning as everyone is trying to reconfigure the pecking order. Our Ameraucana is especially noisy because I think she wants to make sure she won't be at the bottom of the pecking order again.

And our minor scare this morning... I went to the chicken run, and the little ones were no where to be found. One of our cats hopped over the fence from our front yard making quite a bit of noise, and sure enough both little pullets were on our neighbors driveway out front. They made quite a fuss about getting caught. We had already clipped one wing on each of them, but we went ahead and clipped the other, and clipped the originally clipped feathers a bit shorter. Hopefully it won't take long for them to realize this is home.

So introducing...

Our Easter Egger Pullet

Our Black Australorp Pullet

Our Blue Ameraucana

And the best thing about the Blue Ameraucana (besides the fact that she is beautiful and comes from show lines)...

We finally get blue eggs!!!

Just to give some perspective, this is an egg from our other Ameraucana who was supposed to lay blue eggs. Hers turned out to be light pink, so we are so happy to finally have blue eggs.