I adore babies, all babies, especially babies I can watch but not actually have to take care of! One of our farm goals is to have enough chickens that we can hatch about 25-50 new babies a year and not have to order them anymore. Ordering chickens is expensive and also requires me to care for them, in my house, which is really cute for the first week, but stops being so cute when they get big enough to smell….all the time.
This year we had a bantam (little chicken) that was insistent on setting. I decided to let her since bantam eggs are about 1/2 a regular egg, which is great when you need to modify a recipe which now requires 1/2 an egg, or you want a light breakfast, but otherwise is fairly useless.
After about three weeks of waiting patiently, who am I kidding, I am so impatient. Near the end I was checking the nest abut twice a day. Anyway, Saturday I went to check on the eggs to discover this:
They are absolutely adorable. When I took this picture there were 5 that had hatched. As of Sunday all 7 eggs had hatched. She is a great mama too. She stayed in the nest for the first 24 hours, then spent Sunday introducing them to the underside of the solar panels. They are such good little babies too. They follow her everywhere and do not stray far, at all. They are so tiny too!!! I love them so much. I also understand that they are tiny little creatures that free range on a farm. Some of them are bound to not make it. However, if we can get half of them through to adulthood, I would call that a success. Also, animals that are raised by their moms seem so much more well adjusted than those that aren’t (my observation of this are coming from the first 48 hours of mama hen and the ducks, so more data is needed, meaning MORE FARM BABIES!). Here are more pictures for your viewing pleasure:
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