In honor of International Heritage Breeds Week (May 15-21, 2016), I'd like to skip ahead in our chicken keeping adventures and introduce to you our new editions around here. Cue, cute balls of fluff and feathers:
Meet the newest, rather vocal, members of this crazy life we lead, who arrived via a 26-hour trip from Missouri on the twelfth: seventeen Delaware chicks.
Having started our chicken keeping adventures last spring with seven Plymouth Barred Rocks, a mid-nineteenth century breed, which are on the recovering list of Heritage Poultry Breeds by the Livestock Conservancy, we figured that another heritage breed would be a good edition. (Plus, as history people, we are biased towards heritage breeds. Go figure.) Plymouth Barred Rocks are hearty birds that can withstand differences in weather, overall climate, and work well both free-ranging and confined. On top of that, Plymouth Barred Rocks are a dual-purpose breed, being wonderful brown egg layers, and also good meat birds. Before being replaced by other more modern breeds, Plymouth Barred Rocks were popular in the meat bird industry as broilers during the 1920s. Two of our roosters went by the way of the meat birds, and ended up in our freezer. Our third rooster (above, left) is happy with his four hens who keep us in a lot of eggs as they pass their first full year of life.
So why not stick with Plymouth Barred Rocks, and add some more of them to the flock instead of another breed, since they're such a great dual purpose bird? I'm blaming this one on the Mr. (Who knew there's Crazy Chicken Men and not just Crazy Chicken Ladies?) He noticed the Delawares, and literally on his birthday we ordered fifteen of them. Thanks to the hatchery for throwing in two extras in the tragic event that not all the chicks we ordered would make it through the mail, we now have seventeen (as they all made it through).
Delawares are a much younger breed than our Plymouth Barred Rocks are, but ironically, more difficult to locate. On the watch list of Heritage Poultry Breeds by the Livestock Conservancy they come in slightly more endangered than the Plymouth Barred Rocks. Delawares have only been around since 1940, just sliding into the cutoff for heritage breeds (a breed that has been around since at least the mid-twentieth century). They, like the Plymouth Barred Rocks, are good dual purpose birds and were utilized by the meat industry up through the 1950s as broilers.
Thus, we decided that the Delawares would become our meat flock and the Plymouth Barred Rocks would be our laying flock. (Thank goodness the Mr. designed a coop that would hold so many birds! I have a feeling he secretly knew what was to come when building it.) Both flocks would be separated on their own side of the coop and run system, and contain their own rooster along with a few hens.
Still young and only gaining their first black-tipped white wing feathers, our Delawares are currently in quarantine in a brooder in the wood shed, waiting until they hit at least a month of age and the weather gets warmer, for them to be sent out to the coop with the "big chickens." For now, they're only testing out their newly discovered "big chicken skills," scratching in the new shavings and testing out their wings, which you can watch in our video below.
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