St. Luke's Attic

Is it the unseasonably warm weather? A remarkable confluence of the planets? Something in the water? I don’t know, but one of my hens has gone broody and she’s sitting on a bunch of eggs. Usually a couple of my hens will go broody in the spring and it will be a real hassle to get them up off the nest when we don’t want chicks. Last year I let two hens sit on about 18 eggs each. That was way too many eggs for them, but they put up with the extras and most of them hatched. We even had a relatively predator-free spring and almost all the chicks made it to adulthood. Success!

The Baron in all his authority, surrounded by his harem.

In the mean time, we picked up an extra rooster in addition to The Baron. (Uncharacteristically, my wife really wanted this little guy. We had some friends trying to unload a rooster, my wife saw a gentle little silky mix rooster and said she really wanted him. We even named him Captain Feather Foot. Or The Captain, for short.) Also, we kept one of the roosters from our last batch of chicks. This one was too pretty to process. He’s unofficially known as Blondie. The others were handsome birds, but into the freezer they went.

Blondie is working hard to overtake The Baron as Rooster-in-Charge.

Captain Feather Foot lurks on the fringes and waits for his opportunities.

So anyway, there’s a lot of… activity… in the chicken run what with three roosters running amongst something like twenty five hens. My little Swedish Black went broody either on Christmas day or on the 26th. That should put the hatch date for these chicks at about January 15th or 16th. I assume all three of my roosters will be represented in this batch. I just hope my little hen has a chick of her own in there for all the work she’s doing. The Clark homestead will have winter chickens instead of spring chickens this year!

The Swedish Black waits out the long three weeks until her babies hatch.

Life’s a blur in the chicken run.

Of course, dear reader, this means that you can expect more chicken artwork coming in the near future. Maybe a linocut of that beautiful Mottled Java? A dignified portrait of the Swedish Black? Perhaps a dashing print of Blonide, the quasi or semi-Salmon Faverolle? You’ll just have to wait and see.