About our chickens
too many choices!
Speckled Sussex (in the snow), Barred Plymouth Rock, Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds, Silver-laced Wyandottes, Blue-laced Red Wyandotte.... what? We chose the breeds we did with several things in mind:
- Friendliness and gentle dispositions
- Healthy and hearty in our cold, dry climate
- Reliable egg laying habits (over 200 eggs a year, each)
- Our Buff Orpingtons are likely to be especially good mothers
- Our Blue Laced Red Wyandotte rooster was chosen because quite frankly, he is beautiful, and many of his chicks will be sex-linked, meaning the males and females will look different at hatch
Living at 9100'/2775 m can be challenging for any animal, including humans! There really is less oxygen available in each breath, so we have to take deeper breaths and build more red blood cells. Animals raised here from a very young age, will grow bigger-than-average hearts and lungs, including our chickens, an adaptation that helps them cope with conditions in the Rocky Mountains.
As chicks, they live in the house with us in a cage with multiple heat sources, several kinds of food, and ample fresh water. We baby our babies, playing with them a bit so they get used to people but carefully avoiding stressing them out, which can make them get sick more easily. Once they're old enough and our weather is a bit warmer, they will move outside to the coop attached to our barn, with free run of their large enclosed space in the trees, and forays into the fenced yard for sunshine, weeds and grasses, and yummy bugs.
Everything is done by hand, by us. We feed them organic scratch and egg-layer feed plus flax seed meal to boost the Omega-3 content of their eggs, water them, move them around, and play with them. We talk to them all the time and they talk right back.
When you see the "happy hens" or "free range" labeling on eggs at the supermarket, you have to wonder what that means, because there are no legal definitions of "happy" and "free range" literally just means that a door was open to the outside, not that the hens EVER set one foot on outside ground, never mind got to run around, being chickens. Our birds do just that.
Once we have enough eggs to sell the extras on a regular basis, you'll be able to buy Dory Dozens with confidence, knowing that our girls are happy, well-fed, and treated humanely at all times.
