Mama Roux and Grace

About 8 weeks ago we inherited an existing flock of chickens. It is comprised of a variety of chickens (Americaunas, Bantams, and a Belgian Boot-legged Bantam) along with 4 roosters. We THOUGHT we were just getting 3...but, there were 4! The Americaunas (3) are big hens that lay big eggs that will produce big birds and lots of little bantam hens (6) that lay little eggs that will produce little birds. We would prefer to have bigger eggs because all of Jeff's recipes (and mine) have been calculated using large eggs.

While we were out of town on vacation, the house sitter didn't collect all of the freshly laid eggs out of the chicken coop. It seems that Mama Roux (a bantam hen) and Martha (an Americauna hen that lays pastel green/blue eggs) were sharing a nesting box. When we got home there were 4 pastel eggs and 4 little white eggs. We removed the white eggs...not quite sure what we were going to do with them...but decided to let Mama Roux hatch the other green eggs. We removed the little eggs, set them in a basket outside the coop...and the dogs stole them and ate them!!! That was a first!!! Jeff thought that the dogs hid the eggs...an early Easter?...but then we later saw evidence of little shells in the lawn in their...well...anyway, you know what...

We let Mama Roux sit on the eggs/the clutch thinking that maybe a couple of the eggs were fertile and we would have a few more hens. Well, seems that Martha liked laying her eggs in Mama Roux's box and we went out the next day to find 5 eggs. Jeff marked each of them with an X so we could tell when a new one appeared, but then we discovered that Mama Roux turned the eggs so many times a day that it rubbed off all of the markings!

In the end, Martha had laid 7 more eggs, totaling 12 by the time Mama Roux hatched her one and only little chick (that is one of Martha's and will soon be bigger than Mama!) My father requested we name the chick Grace, after the Pirate Queen of Ireland. Well...it is now named Grace, and if it is a boy, it will be Grayson!