New chickens

A lot has been going on that we haven't really posted about, but we either forgot, or didn't have the camera with us. Hopefully we will get posts up, although they will be all out of order chronologically. Oh well.

Anyway... this past weekend we drove to Half Moon Bay to check out the Fall 2009 chick collection down at the farm store. We were hoping to get some gold chickens, or generally anything different looking than the chicken we already have. We ended up with two golden sex-linked chicks and two Ameraucana chicks. I think the lighter ones are the Ameraucanas and the darker ones are the golden sex linked (a cross between a rhode island red rooster and a rhode island white hen, or white rock hen). I think the golden sex link is also called a Golden Comet. Chicken breeding is confusing. I am worried that one of these is male since they look so different in color (see below), but according to the internet, the males should be totally white, while the females are redder. Maybe the two chickens we have are both golden sex linked, but actually produced from different crosses. It's confusing. Here they are climbing onto their little nest:

Here's a shot of all four together. The two on the right are Ameraucanas. They will lay funny colored eggs one day.
Here's another group shot:

Here's a close-up chicken shot:
They like to run around and cheep like crazy and then they all fall over asleep as if they died on the spot. In this picture you can see one asleep with her (hopefully) face still in the food. Pretty cute.

They are only two weeks old so they are supposed to be under a heat lamp for another two weeks and then at room temperature for another month after that, until they are fully feathered. Hopefully we can still put them out in the barn before that point if it doesn't get too cold. At about 8 weeks old we start slowly introducing them to the Sullys. It's kind of a long process.

It's hard not to call them Sullys, but they are supposed to all have a different name than the original three chickens. We haven't come up with anything chicken appropriate just yet.