Jodie Otte, Baltimore Maryland Child and Baby Photographer

LOL - well…. everyone has been asking to update on the chicks.  Yeah, lemme tell you, I was told that I should set double the amount of eggs that I wish to have chicks.  I was told 50% hatch rate.  I figured I could take another 14, minus roosters, so maybe I would end up with about  7 to 10 new hens… sounded good.  So I set 28 eggs in incubators.  I ended up having 26 out of those 28 hatch.  Ummm… guess I’m not a bad chick momma? Of course, this entire process was not without other interesting factors…

One of the chicks was born deformed (this was a black and copper maran that I had the eggs shipped from E Bay) and unfortunately, we had to face culling the chick after I tried a little “chicken orthopaedics” which included splints and a teacup (long story).  Some of the chicks were “shrink wrapped” and I was performing “surgery” on them to remove the shrink wrapped membrane.  The chick below hatched too early, and had some bleeding, so I had to carry it around for a while, keeping it warm until the bleeding stopped…

We just finished finding homes for 9 of the 26 we had, but then a bearded silkie hatched underneath one of my broody hens out in the coop, so I had to rescue her once she was pecked in the face… she’s doing very well now… anyway, I snapped a few natural light images the other day of a few of our little ones…

This is an “olive egger”. I bred our ameraucana rooster with both barred rocks and rhode island reds, so this is one of the rhode island red crosses, and should have olive-colored eggs. The barred rock crosses are all black with a little bit of white on them (not shown)

These are ameraucanas on the left (they lay blue eggs) and two black and copper marans (from E Bay) on the right (they lay almost a chocolate brown egg)…  Do you see a theme?  I’m collected all different colored egg layers.  Hopefully by fall, we will have white, pinkish cream, beige, blue, olive, and chocolate brown - and yes, of course, I will update with egg pictures

And here’s our little designer chicks for fun… these are bearded silkies, assorted colors… all six that I set hatched out just fine… When these grow up, you will not see their eyes… the tufts on their heads and beards under their beaks will make them look like a fluffball with a beak… LOL!