Chicken Watch

I bought rare Java chicken eggs on eggbid.com. (Did you know there was such a site?)

I bought a "Little Giant" incubator and stuck ten of the eggs in it. I turn them three times a day. Looks cozy, doesn't it? My fear is that all the eggs are dead.


However, my friend Judy has Buff Orpington chickens and she told me one of them had gone "broody" - that is, pathetically, that it had started sitting and sitting on an empty nest, not even getting up to eat. It didn't seem to notice it had no eggs. So we put five of my eggs under this chicken.

If they survive, they're supposed to hatch on Yom Kippur. I'll let you know.


As for the chickens I've had for a few weeks, they are now truly "free-ranging." They thought there might be something tasty here amongst the hardware and they scuffle through the sunflower seed husks that fall out of my wild bird feeder. They eat slugs and are systematically digging up the foundation of their henhouse.



I post this picture for the people who've been asking me: "Why haven't you named them?" They are just poultry units, that's why. They're amusing as an aggregate but a little lacking in personality. I call them like this: "Chickens! Chickens!"