Macro Monday ~ Eggs and Cookies

 

These two double yolker eggs were laid by my Welsumer and Cuckoo Marans hens.

 

These delicious cookies were a gift from my blogger friend, Susan over at The Lazy G Ranch. She asked her readers to come up with a name for two of her homemade cookie varieties, and the winners would receive a half dozen of her cookies as a prize! I came up with the name “I Heart You Cookies” and she liked it so much, that’s what these cookies are called. The wooden box was a gift to me for Christmas, from Ranchman John. (Doesn’t the black horse look like Baby Doll and the red horse look like Rosie?)

(Yes, there is one cookie missing. I couldn’t wait to try one before I remembered to take a photo. oops!) I am slightly embarrassed to admit it, but when the cookies arrived, I immediately hid them and never shared any with my family. These cookies were such a special treat after coming home from my long days spent trail riding in the snow and participating in the Trail Clinic last weekend. I knew my kids would just gobble them up and not really appreciate the complexity and gourmet qualities of these special cookies. But I did.

Truly, these ‘I Heart You Cookies’ are the best butter cookies I’ve ever had. And I’m rather picky about my sweets. But that’s the thing. They aren’t too sweet or too rich. They are perfectly balanced and actually melt in your mouth. The sugar sprinkles are a nice touch, too. They give the cookies a fancy look, but the little bit of crunch and sweetness add the perfect accent and texture, too.

You can’t go wrong ordering Susan’s quality made cookies either for yourself or for a gift. Susan is also in the perfecting stages of a chocolate cookie, too. She really liked the name I came up with for them, too: “Cocoa Ponies”, and I’m crossing my fingers that I get to be one of the first to try them out (wink-wink)!

Check out The Lazy G Ranch to get some of your own. She also makes gourmet dog treats, too!

And also visit Macro Mondays to see more close-up views from around the world!

Wordless Wednesday ~ Snow Chicken

 

 

(Our 6th snowfall of the season today, leaving behind about 4” on the ground)

Merry Christmas!

We’re Eleven Weeks Old!

 

Where has the time gone? How can it be that our first chicks born here at Laughing Orca Ranch could now be almost 3 months old?

Our weather warmed up a bit the past couple days, so I chose to sit outside in the coop with our chickens on Friday afternoon. I haven’t done that for a while and it sure was nice just sitting there among my feathered friends enjoying them pecking,

preening,

(Looks a little like Rolkur, doesn’t it?)

fluffing,

eating,

and even sleeping.

Many of them came over to be petted, to peck at my boots and clothes and to have their pictures taken. It is so much fun for me to photograph our chickens.

 

(Yes, those are snowman jammies and leopard muck boots. Doesn’t everyone wear items like these for farm duties?)

They have the most interesting faces and expressions at times.

 

And I love their many feather colors, shapes and patterns. (Phyllis Diller seems to be having a bad hair day)

 

Watching the babies is also very entertaining.

Seeing how they are much more active in the flock than the older chickens, and how well they’ve integrated themselves into the flock is fascinating to me.

Mrs. Cotton still spends time with her babies, but is a lot less patient with them and doesn’t defend them from the other chickens or even me.

 

She seems to have let her chicks leave the nest with no regrets.

And her chicks seem be enjoying their independence and newfound places within the flock.

It’s also very interesting to see how their Papa, Sid Vicious relates to them, and they to him. He is very tolerant  and protective of them already and he is often standing with them or nearby.

I’m glad they are looking more and more like Sid, because even though I think the SIlkie chickens are very pretty and cute with all their soft fluff, Sid is my favorite and is the most eye-catching and photographic of all of our chickens.

(I call him chicken coop eye-candy)

While he’s not an affectionate roo with me, he is very respectful of me (especially after that one and only time he tried to attack me last Spring, for holding one if his…..my hens, and he ended up airborne. A batter could have ran a homerun after my pitch). But my handsome boy doesn’t seem to hold any grudges and he’ll even come hang out near me and will pose endlessly for the camera. Yeh, Sid’s a Camera Ham. (or is that camera fowl?).

Sometimes I’ll catch him checking out his shadow, probably to be sure each top feather is in it’s place.

His kids take after their Dad, too.

I can definitely see that at least two of them have Ameracauana (Easter Eggers) Mothers, too.

 

(Oh man! That photo cracks me up!)

This is Jenna’s Ameracauna hen, Angelina Ballerina. I just love those cheek fluffs.

 

And all three of them have the Polish fluff heads, too.

 

I am pretty positive that this chick is a rooster. He resembles his Daddy so much. And he is already quite handsome.

 

But I’m not 100% sure this one is a roo. It has the most gold color of all three chicks. Quite flashy. It’s probably a roo. I’m still going to hold out hope on this one, though, at least until it belts out it’s first crow.

But this chick I feel pretty confidant is a hen. She is mostly black with only a few flecks of gold.

I’m still not sure who her Mama might be. It will be interesting to see what color her eggs turn out to be.

Like this batch of eggs that some of our hens have given this week. Our Welsumer hens are reliably laying those dark chocolate eggs. The smaller cream colored eggs are being produced by Mrs. Cotton, the Japanese Silkie. And the small white egg is a product of Phyllis Diller our Buff-laced Polish hen. And the large pink-tinted egg was laid by Myrtle one of our Ameracauna (Easter Egger) hens.

And finally, the odd colored, army-green eggs with “chocolate chip” speckles are being laid by our Cuckoo Marans hen.

 

As I was sitting outside among my chickens, in the warmth of the sunshine, a huge booming and vibrating was heard in the sky above us. We sometimes have military aircraft fly over our house and property from Kirtland AFB, and they are often quite low. But these helicopters were the lowest by far. I can’t imagine they were more than a couple hundred feet above the ground. The air and ground vibrated as they flew overhead.

My time outside with the chickens ended as soon as the sun moved westward and dropped behind the trees that surround the coop. Without the sun, the temperature felt much colder than 30 degrees. But it sure was nice while it lasted.

 

Sid Vicious even regaled me with one of his best crows on my way out the coop gate.

 

Thanks for making me feel at home, my feathered friends. Good night. Sleep Tight.

   

The End…………

 

Chocolate Eggs

 

First off, I just want to thank everyone who participated and left comments on my Caption Contest post. They were all good. I chose Nuzzling Muzzles as the winner because she made me laugh the loudest. Her caption was creative, too.

But I also really liked Flartus’s comment, too. A year ago I made a post very similar to her soap opera inspired comment ‘All My Chickens’, called ‘As the Coop Turns’, so her caption was just great. I have a little literary prize for Flartus, too. And Nuz Muz, let me know if you’d like a scarf to go with the hat I made you last winter, girlfriend!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now onto the post related to the title above…….   

For a while there I thought one of our Welsumer chicks was a rooster. She was bigger than the other Welsumer chick and she was more aggressive. She was also very independent and would rather roost in the apple tree inside the chicken coop, instead of inside the chicken house with all the other chickens.

I’m relieved that my suspicions were wrong, though. Because apparently Wanda, whose name has now been changed to Hershey, is most definitely a hen…..

A hen who lays lovely chocolate eggs. Hershey has given us five chocolate eggs over the past week. You can see her first two below.

The first chocolate wonder was tiny, as you can see. And the second egg was much bigger. I placed them beside our Rhode Island Red’s brown egg and one of our Easter Egger’s blue-green eggs for comparison.

 

I should have realized that Hershey was just older than the other two chicks, including the other Welsumer chick and the Cuckoo Marans chick that I brought home at the end of August, from the Poultry Swap.

Recently, instead of running away when I try to pet her, Hershey squats down and ‘presents herself’ to me, as if I was a rooster. That’s the first sign that a chicken has moved past the pullet stage into an official egg laying hen.

    

The other Welsumer pullet, we’ve decided to name Cocoa, and we can’t wait until she lays her first chocolate egg so we can compare it to Hershey’s eggs.

Our third chocolate egg layer is the Cuckoo Marans pullet, who has been named Snickers (do you get the theme here? Are you hungry yet?), will probably start to lay around the same time as Cocoa, and it will be interesting to compare the egg color and shade of chocolate between the Welsumer and the Cuckoo Marans.

It’s also interesting to compare the differences between the Cuckoo Marans and the Barred Rock, as in the photo above. I used to think the two breeds looked the same, but when placed together, it’s easy to see the differences in their feathering.

Some have asked why eggshell color matters. And it’s true, egg color on the outside doesn’t affect the taste of the egg inside. But to many folks, a brown egg means farm-grown, not store-bought. Case in point, I have one hen, a Brown Leghorn, that lays a single, huge white egg every day. The White Leghorns are the breed of hen that are used in production/factory-farming because they are such reliable egg layers, but sometimes when I have included a couple of my Brown Leghorn’s extra-large, white eggs in a carton for sale, I’ll get a customer that asks me, “Why did you put a store-bought egg in there?”

So, now I keep those big, tasty white eggs for my family and only sell the brown or blue/green eggs to my customers. And that is why I added some new brown egg layers to my flock this year. The darker the eggs, the better.

Chocolate Eggers

 

On Saturday I went to the much anticipated Poultry Swap located in my nearest town, hosted by a feed store. I just found out today that the event was a success and the vendors sold more than 100 chickens, ducks, geese, pheasant, and quail! It was such a success that the organizers plan to do this event once a month. Yay!

Between losing two chickens this year and my birthday this Friday I knew I wanted to bring home two new chickens. And I’ve been coveting the large, dark-brown chocolate eggs that the rare Welsumer and Cuckoo Maran breeds produce.

(Welsumer Eggs. I love that they are sometimes speckled)

(Cuckoo Maran Eggs)

(Welsumer on the left and Cuckoo Maran on the right)

The Poultry Swap started at 9am, so I got up about 7am, so I could let the dogs out, feed and water the woolies and the chickens, prepare the crockpot with Posole for dinner, and get to the event early.

Good thing, too. There was only one person selling Marans and Welsumers and she sold out by 9:15am! She ran a special: Buy two for $20 or three for $25. Of course I had to buy three! lol!

(When I first got them home, I placed all three in a separate area away from my older chickens, just like I did when I integrated my 2 Polish and 2 Silky chickens to my already established flock.)

   

Right away I noticed that one of the chickens (the above pullet on the far left) was larger and more aggressive than the other two, and they were terrified of her. I was also concerned that maybe I was given a rooster instead of a hen, but after doing some research, I don’t think that’s the case. Rather that the two chickens on the right are younger than the chicken on the left. (What do you folks think?)

 

Well I realized immediately that the small intro cage wasn’t going to work well in this situation, so I rigged up a pen in the corner of my coop using t-posts and chicken wire, and placed the girls inside.

  

The new chickens seemed to like their temporary house and pen and were happy to march right inside that first night and go to sleep as soon as it was dusk. The next morning, though they had flown the coop!

Well not exactly. I keep bird mesh above my coop to keep my chickens safe from hawks, eagles, ravens and vultures, which also prevents my new chickens from flying out as well. I was actually impressed with how well the new chickens were integrating with my established flock with only a few stern pecks from my older hens just to remind them of their seniority.

And the new chickens were relieved to have the temporary pen to escape to if things got a little too overwhelming or they wanted to eat or drink in peace.

The next evening was weird, though. I watched the larger Welsumer pullet fly out of her pen right after I closed their gate. I figured she’d either fly back in and crawl into the temporary chicken house when it got dark, or she’d be waiting for me to put her back in once all of my established flock had gone into their house.

Nope. When I went back out later after dark, the larger Welsumer was nowhere to be seen. I was afraid she’d gone into the established flock’s house unprotected (where my flock would have probably ganged up on her), but instead I finally found her roosting in the apple tree in our coop all alone! I’ve never had a chicken who wanted to roost in our apple tree…and all alone, too. What an independent chicken she is!

 

(See how rooster-like she looks? Especially her tail feathers. Except she has no beetle-black coloring on her chest or tail. She was very alert in this picture listening to two of my hens announcing to the entire world that they had both laid eggs.)

The Welsumer coloring reminds me a lot of my Brown Leghorns. But I really like the looks of the Cuckoo Maran as they look so similar to the Barred Rocks, except the Cuckoo Maran has blue legs and the Barred Rocks have yellow legs. And of course, there is that huge difference in the egg color, too. *grin*

And I can only think of one thing better than chocolate colored eggs, and that is chocolate flavored eggs. Yum!

From the Tower of,