Introducing:
Valkyrie
Medea
and Irene!
These girls have several things in common with the Republican Budget:
--They entered the world on April Fool's Day.
--They are light and fluffy.
--They have no numbers, no mathematical ability, and no common sense.
--They cheep, cheep, cheep all day long but you can't understand a word they say.
Valkyrie is bright yellow right now, but she will become a white Leghorn. My son wanted a name that would fit her yellow-gold color and be fierce. However, she may be the runt of the group, getting shoved aside at the food dish and ending up on the bottom of a pile-on slumber party.
Medea, the black and white girl spreading her itsy-bitsy wings, is a silver-laced Wyandotte. We've already decided that she is the smartest chick of this bunch (which isn't saying much): first to find her food and water, most inquisitive and curious, first to figure out how to get back into the cage when we pick her up. My son likes mythology, and I think he felt that her black-and-white feathers needed a dual name. (Medea started out as a common or garden variety beautiful-princess-trophy, given to Jason of the Argonauts fame. Later, Jason dumped her and she went into Fatal Attraction mode.)
And Irene's name came from the movie/book Black Hawk Down, which my son likes (the mission was code named Irene). She is a Buff Orpington, and she will stay the same tan-gold color. So far she's the peckiest.
They were born on April 1, arrived in California two days later, purchased by us ($5 each) Saturday morning, and settling in nicely so far. Baby chicks have to be kept hot, so here is their electrical hazard incredibly high tech and pricey incubator:
Cage: old guinea pig cage, repurposed
Lamp #1 with incandescent light bulb*
Space heater
Lamp #2 with two incandescent light bulbs*
Tupperware container for water and lid for food
*=Incandescent light bulbs, which emit 90% of their energy as heat and 10% as light, are good for something!
They've met Pojo, the Ameraucana who lays the beatiful green eggs
. Pojo was the last of a prior group of three born in 2006. She was at the bottom of the pecking order, and she seems lost and sad now that her friends are gone. All four of them will roam around my back yard, eating bugs and laying eggs, for what I hope to be natural lifespans.
Why raise chickens? Many answers can be found in Carver's excellent and rec-list diary, Urban Chicken Diaries, Part One, but here's my reasons:
- They lay organic, free range, fresh eggs. Supermarket eggs are no better than supermarket tomatoes: a pale imitation of the real thing. I also believe that, overall, they are
cheeper cheaper than our expensive California eggs; I spend about $15 on food for 1 chicken every 3-4 months, which gives me about 72-90 eggs.
- They help keep garden pests, notably slugs and ants (aka lunch and snacks) under control.
- They're compost machines: they eat kitchen food scraps that might otherwise go to a landfill, which eventually end up in chicken manure, which goes into a garden in which food will be grown, thus generating more kitchen scraps, which in turn....
- They're part of a self sufficient lifestyle in which one is responsible, as much as possible, for one's own food (see, e.g., James Howard Kunstler's World Made By Hand book, Oregon Trail computer game).
- On a related note, home-chicken-raising was extremely common across America until the 1930s. The hygiene movement of the 1930s-50s convinced most people that eggs were better produced at a factory, and babies were better fed by formula. How did that work out again?
- They provide hours of entertainment!
This is the time of year when chicks are easiest to find and raise. A chick born by Easter will be laying eggs by Halloween. I'll post more diaries (with adorable chicks pix!) as they grow older.