A Long Overdue Update

Sooo... Fast forward to 2013, and we're now living on an acre inside city limits. Our property came with a chain-link dog kennel which we converted to our coop. Lost the flock we moved from the country due to coop vulnerabilities, and a second flock also due to coop security...to this day we have no idea how whatever got in and beheaded all our hens. I was sad and down about the whole chicken-keeping thing for a while.

In May 2011 I ordered the All Pullet Rainbow Assortment from Meyer Hatchery, but my chicks were delayed in the mail due to the Joplin Missouri tornado, and only one chick survived the trip - Tiny Dancer, a Columbian Wyandotte. Today she's our only standard hen.  She shares the coop with 2 easter-egger and 3 mixed bantams hens that we got from Shari in Crawfordville.

Yesterday morning, our order of 10 bantam chicks from Ideal Poultry arrived.

2 sultan, 2 white-crested black Polish, and 6 of their feather-legged bantam assortment. One of the sultan chicks could not stand. It's legs were neither splayed nor spraddled, but sticking straight up. Even though we babied the poor thing, it was gone by evening. The other ones are doing great, in a bin under lights inside my backyard candlemaking studio.

Here's my guesses of the 6 assorted chicks:

1. Black cochin
2. Silver penciled cochin
3. Blue mille fleur Belgian bearded d'Uccle
4. Partridge cochin
5. Buff cochin
6. Golden neck d'Uccle

Let's see how my predictions turn out!