Used Omlet outdoor rabbit run Width 2.2m Height 2.05m Length 3.1m vgc.

[Haehnchen]

Mystery solved ... we caught one of the white ones delivering a full-blown crow. He was the least-likely suspect.

 

Our chicken sex determination skills are clearly rubbish! All the others appear to be aggressive hens.

[jennym]

Hi Haehnchen,

 

I've just found this thread, how entertaining! I've had just three ladies for a few (5?) weeks now so I'm no expert, but I thought I'd have a go at identifying some of your chickens. Maybe it will encourage those who know more to correct me and identify the ones I can't!

 

The white ones look like leghorns, perhaps? If they are they'll lay white eggs (well, the hen will!). The ginger one could be a gingernut ranger (Rhode Island Red x Light Sussex), aka Warren/Goldline/Hyline (I think they're all the same!). I think the ISA Brown (Rhode Island Red * Rhode Island White) is a very similar hen in appearance, so maybe it could be that to?

 

I am not sure about the two darker ones. The larger does look a bit like a cockerel but in some breeds the hens have long-ish tails too, so I am really not sure. He/she is lovely though, I love the buff streaks & splotches!

 

C'mon folks - there are lots out there who know much more than me, so please tell me I'm wrong (or possibly right?) and offer some other suggestions!

[Haehnchen]

Thanks for taking a stab;your reply was, in fact, most helpful.

 

The two white ones look like what one would find in the encyclopedia under "chicken" ... and now we know one of them is a rooster.

 

The one we thought was a rooster is the big grey/brown mottled one that looks like she's wearing multicam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiCam. The brown one could be a Rhode Island Red variant. All I know is that someone's likely to find me chasing her around the run with a scissors one of these days, because her feathers are magnificent. So are the speckled hen's; she could be a Sussex variant (all I know is that when I hear "Speckled Hen" it makes me thirsty for some reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Speckled_Hen).

 

Don't forget, a bit under three months ago these were all just eggs from the local farmer!

[Haehnchen]

The Jackson Five is about to (perhaps temporarily) become the Jackson Four as we've discovered 1) at least two of the five are roosters, which is making the flock too nervous and 2) despite our our back meadow being zoned agricultural, we are really too close to too many other houses for the ongoing crowing of the dominant rooster.

 

Ironically, the smallest of the bunch (one of the white ones) is the rooster who's turned out to be phenomenally loud. The other rooster is much more sedate and muffled.

 

We are taking him back to the farmer where we initially sourced the fertilized eggs, where he can crow all he wants at the Lernbauernhof http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lernbauernhof-rhein-main.de%2Findex.htm&sl=de&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8

 

We'll hold off on replacing him with a hen as we see whether four is a better constellation. Otherwise, everything's great!

[Sam]

That's great that he's being rehomed, looks a lovely place to roam about!

I'm by no means an expert, but it looks like you have a few more cockerels there...

Good luck with the Jackson 4!!

[Haehnchen]

Update: The farmer already had a lot of roosters already, but said he'd order us two hens on his next bulk purchase (price discovery: German hens are 5-8 euros apeice) in a few weeks to bring us back up to five.

 

Therefore, tomorrow the small white loud rooster and the multicam big but sedate rooster will be going up to my wife's cousin's farm, where he recently had a fox attack that left him a bit short on roosters for his c. 20-chicken operation.

 

There may well be a third, but up until now we're thinking transgender, so will take our chances.

 

All's well that ends well in chicken land.

[Haehnchen]

The chicken saga continues. So, as planned, my father-in-law came down to Frankfurt on some hunting-related business and picked up the two we knew were 100% certain were roosters for relocation up north. About two minutes after we'd taken them out for transport the second white one let loose with a crow! Since we're increasingly convinced the speckled one is a rooster as well, that would leave the brown one as the only hen. If we have to move those two as well next week, then Plan B is to stay with our standing order with the local farmer for two replacement hens ... maybe three if the brown one starts crowing as well.

 

What is the statistical probability of four roosters in a batch of five randomly-selected eggs?

[Haehnchen]

My daughter is taking one of her ponies up to her grandparents' for a week http://rufv-edertal.de/anlage/impressionen/ , and I will follow with the second surprise white rooster next weekend for re-homing in Elsoff http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.elsoff-wittgenstein.de%2F&sl=de&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8 along with his previously-re-homed brothers . We've decided that the constellation back here should be the one speckled rooster, the brown hen and then two or three replacement hens from the local farmer's next order to bring us back to the Jackson Four or Five.

 

Nice to know that most of our our original rooster hatch are ending up in an even more picturesque location!

[Haehnchen]

Our handyman now thinks the brown one might be a rooster as well ... I think I jinxed it by nick-naming them The Jackson Five after an all-male quintet. We'll keep one, re-home the other two up in Elsoff as previously described and back-fill with hens so we eventually get some eggs. We're enjoying keeping chickens, but hatching our own has officially entered the "been there, done that" category.

[jennym]

What is the statistical probability of four roosters in a batch of five randomly-selected eggs?

 

Not as small as you might think - it's actually 15.6%.

 

Funny how excited I was to see that question (I'm a statistician, hehe).

[Haehnchen]

Thank you so much for the reply! I'm a bit of a statistics fan myself, so nice to find a kindred spirit.

 

I'm interested to know your calculation methodology, because I thought if I treated it as five separate eggs with a 50-50 probability, that would be 32 possible outcomes, of which 1 outcome has 5 roosters, making the probability of this is 1/32 or c. 3%.

 

Edit: Remand that: I just saw that you'd responsed to 4/5 ... I tied into your 16%! http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/probability/info.htm

 

As I said before, I think we might well be 3%-ers!

[jennym]

Remand that: I just saw that you'd responsed to 4/5 ... I tied into your 16%!

 

Yep, sorry - I was one post behind. 3% chance of all one sex, 15.6% chance of 4 roosters & 1 hen (or 4 hens and 1 rooster!).

 

There's a handy calculator (link below) for these kinds of calculations if you don't want to use a piece of paper, or if there are too many possibilities to think of them all. Here we have a series of 5 trials (trial = hatching of an egg) with each trial having a probability of 'success' of 0.5 (but it doesn't have to be 50-50). You can enter this, plus the number of observed successes (e.g. number of hens) in your set of trials, and it will tell you the probability of this happening.

 

http://stattrek.com/Tables/Binomial.aspx

 

*turns off teacher mode*

[Haehnchen]

Thanks very much. This chicken hobby is certainly a learning experience!

[Haehnchen]

Good news; we have the Jackson Five once again!

 

We gave four roosters to my wife's cousin's farm in Elsoff, and in return he gave us two white and two brown hens.

 

We kept the big speckled rooster, who now looks like a BMW 7-series parked next to four 3-series.

[jennym]

Lovely, sounds like you have a nice little flock now.

 

Pictures?

[Haehnchen]

Lovely, sounds like you have a nice little flock now. Pictures?

 

Your wish is our command

 

Perhaps I'm selectively processing visual information differently than I should, but I'm personally gobsmacked that after only two days of fresh air, fresh grass and greens and ample water in the Eglu on our lower meadow, the new hens already look as though they've just been on a spa weekend in comparison to how scrawny and, well, henpecked they looked to when we placed them in the back of the truck up in Elsoff for transport home on Sunday. Turns out that they were rescued from an operation that, whilst not in the battery category (which Germany frowns upon), were originally sourced from a big box farm. We're so happy that they're happy ... and they might be c. 20 weeks or so so eggs might finally be on the agenda!

 

We actually witnessed a singular inter-species encounter as we were loading up for the drive back on Sunday ... we have a c. nine-year-old Jack Russell/parson's terrier who has been going a bit nuts barking at the Eglu through the fence at the new chickens for the past few weeks. She was along for the trip up north, and while we we were loading one of the ponies into the trailer we put her in the back seat of the 4x4 truck. While we weren't looking, she jumped over the back seat and into the cardboard transport box with the four hens, but instead of doing anything nasty, we found her 10 minutes later peacefully cuddling up with the hens ... all this time she wasn't barking because she wanted to wreck havoc with the chickens, she just wanted to be part of the flock. Amazing.

[Haehnchen]

We just had our first egg this morning!

[Chickvic]

Congratulations on your first egg I've only just seen this thread and have thoroughly enjoyed reading your exploits! Keep us posted

[Haehnchen]

The folks over at Backyardchickens.com may have successfully identified our flock http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=552546

[Haehnchen]

Now I've seen everything http://www.louisescountrycloset.com/categories/Poultry-Items/Chicken-Saddles/ .

[Leeloo]

You obviously haven't seen the chicken diaper yet, then!

[jackian]

Speechless

[Haehnchen]

Well, here it is October first and we're about five months into our chicken odyssey, and all I can say is that it has exceeded all expectations. We're getting about 3-4 eggs per day, and the upkeep is a snap on our little farmette.

 

Unexpected aspects: 1) The overall quality of the Eglu cube ... what a great piece of engineering; worth every penny. 2) The eggs are super-high quality. One can see that upon cracking them into the frying pan ... I didn't eat a lot of eggs before, but am eating more now and I don't think I'll ever go back to store-bought. 3) The chicken manure composts down nicely in our thermal composters mixed with some grass clippings. When the chickens were smaller, we had them parked down by the vegetable garden before we moved them closer to the house on the lower meadow. The spot over which the Eglu sat has absolutely exploded with grass in the exact shape of the wire run; there must be something to the magical powers of chicken offal. 4) We have no garden waste whatsoever now ... old spinach, carrot greens, slugged lettuce and pretty much everything else that used to go to the town dump or into the composter now goes into the chicken run. 5) I recently forgot to set an alarm before an important business trip, but our rooster did the trick!

 

What a wonderfully pleasant experience this has been!

[jackian]

How nice to have an update on your girls.

I often wonder what has happened to various threads on here.

 

I bet like me you wonder how you ever managed with out them.. keep in touch .

[Haehnchen]

I'm somewhat contrite that I was so dismissive of the hen saddles. I thought they were decorative things in the same category as doggie coats for little city dogs, but one of our hens was clearly bottom of the pecking order and started to get injured from too much rooster attention. We made one ourselves from an old pair of kids jeans and she now seems to be in better shape. Here's a shot as we were sizing her up before her bespoke tailoring and here she is back in the Eglu Cube