Our new chickens are here! We picked them up yesterday afternoon and brought them home in a cat basket. I’m ashamed to say it, but we have already fallen in love with one of them and, despite the fact that we insisted we weren’t going to give any of them names, she has one.

We settled on three Rhode Rangers in the end, largely because we used to keep them on the farm when I was a kid, but also because they’re good layers. They should average 320 eggs each in their first year, so the three of them combined will more than pay for themselves with close to 1000 eggs between now and next spring.

A Rhode Ranger chicken

The breeder had suggested three Black Rocks instead, and they’d all been caught and caged ready for our arrival, so we did end up leaving them there (and feeling a bit mean about having done so). I’m glad we did, though. These ones are so much prettier.

We kept them in the greenhouse all afternoon (it’s still cold, so they didn’t overheat) and then put them into the coop last night when the three other birds had gone to bed, sitting them on bars by the door. By this morning, when we opened them up, the new ones had been corralled into the nest box and the other hens had taken up the whole of the rest of the coop. The old hens flew down into the compound as usual and then stood looking up menacingly from the bottom of the ladder as the new ones gingerly looked out.

Gabrielle chicken

As we expected the newbies are getting fairly savagely pecked by our three existing hens.The one we gave a name to – Gabrielle, on account of her dodgy eye – came out of the coop this morning with blood on her comb, and this afternoon she has some on her beak. Things are improving, though, as the day goes on, and at least the new ones aren’t hiding under the hen house all the time any more (they would have been hiding in it had we not closed the door).

The fighting will continue as they work out who is top chicken, but I’m hoping that it won’t go on for much more than a few days. Fortunately we’re both working from home tomorrow, so we can keep an eye on them from the window, but I suspect it’s going to be a bit fraught.

Nik and Gabrielle chicken

Related posts:

1. The new chickens are settling in
2. One chicken, one prolapse, one tube of Germoloids… ugh.
3. January 2010 egg count shows how our chickens are declining