The blue eggs hatched on Saturday, the first time we have tried to hatch eggs from our own birds. The five hatched – hurray – three were boys – groan. Cream Legbars are an autosexing breed so normally breeders dispatch the boys a.s.a.p.  but I wasn’t happy at the thought of losing over half of our first clutch. I looked on my favourite “second hand” website under Wanted and discovered that people are looking for cockerels – presumably because most get culled straight away – so they’ve had a reprieve.

On the flip side of chicken keeping, our oldest hen, a warren called Babs, passed away in her sleep last night. I noticed something was amiss on Sunday evening, so I isolated her from the rest on Monday morning, much to the disgust of the others because they were barred from the eglu but she deserved some peace.

Back to the happy stuff, here’s a photo of Jude, our French Copper Marans who is now 4 weeks old, She looks a bit like a vulture but she is very people-friendly. Think she’s going to get a shock when she discovers she’s a chicken …..