One of this years girls

Magnolia

Aylesbury ducklings - on the left is "Lucky"

Big weekend - Victorian Waterfowl Show, which my 2 Aylesbury were entered in. (Firsts in open duck and drake, Tim's were in young duck and drake, his girl taking breed.) The judge made a comment it was nice to see more people getting them out there and hopefully getting more people to take them on as awareness grew.

I fell in LOVE again. This gorgeous little call girl of Broken Birds...

I just love her pretty colouring - so soft, and her lovely dark slately points!

Then today was another auction at Euroa. I got to catch up with a number of people we'd seen at the VWA show and several I've not seen since the last Euroa auction. Everyone from VWA show was there so it was a regular BYP get together!

There were absolute heaps of Indian Games, lots of Pekins in a variety of colours with mixed results, nice number of geese, guinea fowls, OEG, Muzzies, a pair of very nice looking Pekin ducks etc. There were a few Partridge Std Dottes there but the penciling was so poor I'd warrant they were CB instead of PB if I didn't know there were so few CB lines anymore! One had lots of silver in it as well. So I passed on them. Silkies... some black ones but nothing that impressed me. Partridge likewise.

In the end I ended up buying a lavender pekin roo and his daughter

and a "lavender-something" also from John Damiano who incubated eggs for me previously.

Pretty fella!

I also got a trio of OEG bantams - roo is a golden blue duckwing like my other one and the two girls dubbed dun-pyle and golden blue duckwing but a bit course so will probably onsell.

Last but not least, a few clips of the afternoon as it faded into evening on our 'wandering' trip back home...



Last but not least - a few photos of the Wyandotte kids and Aylesbury...

Jarrah x Penny - Clutch #1, Two Bands

Jarrah x Penny, Cluctch 1, One Band

Pullet from the same clutch (foreground) and Penny (background)

Now why couldn't they stand like this at the SHOW?!?

After all these dramas...

Eek... has it been so long since I updated? I guess mostly it's just been watching everyone grow up and been quite calm on that front! I do have new pictures of my lovely 'dottes though.

Cedar, whom I got at the Euroa auction last year.

And my Jarrah and Penny bubs... the first four are from their first clutch and the boys are "The Boys"... big, friendly, curious lugs the lot of them! Hard to get pictures of because you can't hardly get them away from you long enough! They *almost* look like handsome adult boys instead of young and gawky pipsqueeks!

One band

No band (Being naughty and looking the other way!)

And two bands

And their sister, who is even more uncooperative in getting a decent picture! You can see most of adult feathers in though.

And these two girls are from the last clutch from Jarrah, hatched only a few days before he passed away. They're still in their 'toddler' feathers of course. There are eight more of them but they've got their older siblings habits of not holding still!

My little chicks are officially teetering out of cute chickdom and into gawky teenagerhood... You can probably get an idea of males and females in this pic fairly well. The ones with only a little feathers on their wings are boys, the ones with more feathers everywhere are girls. They are growing like weeds and eatting like horses!

After the chooks only being "my" thing, I began to sucker my husband into this by purchasing him a RIR chick which he named Milly after he'd admired one at a show. Over the next few auctions he told me he liked a type and colour he'd seen, "pretty ones, with blue and cream and funny little faces and boots" he reckoned were the breed he'd want if he were to get one. Last weekend we went to the B.M. sale intending to buy some nice black or partridge silkies as my b-day prezzie and while unfortunately I didn't end up buying, DH found a pair of "those pretty ones" (known to the rest of chook-dom as Belgian d'Uccle bantams) which he was told were decent breeding quality and were nicely matched up to each others faults and of a good line (Carolyn Shannon) and so for the princely sum of $35 he is the proud owner of a pair of d'Uccle porcelaines.


They are vigorous little things... haven't missed a beat in breeding or laying - sir rooster 'did the deed' shortly after being placed in the quarantine cage and she has laid an egg a day since arriving! O_O

A belated Merry Christmas!

I don't know if anyone remembers me mentioning just after Christmas that one of the silkie X's I'd bought for broodies went broody just in time for me to slip the last few partridge wyandotte eggs laid under her. I'd joked it was a lovely Christmas present - joked because this was on the day we hit 40 degrees and over the next week we also had disgustingly hot weather so I thought for sure the eggs would be write-offs. I left them under her mostly to keep her broody in case I found some more eggs to slip under her.

Well... guess what I just found when I went out to check on her this morning?

A little bitty face peeking out, still a bit damp. I was pretty chuffed at one chick, far more than I expected out of that batch! (Erm... actually I was worried they'd explode and was thinking of turfing them to exchange for plastic dummy eggs.) So I carefully lifted her off to check and found three more!

I figured I was on a roll and checked the rest of the eggs. Did I dare hope for 1 or 2 more?

The rest of the eggs are *all* pipping or tapping away so fingers crossed (knocking on wood, rubbing horseshoes etc etc) we should have a 100% hatch out of these! The pic above is a little beak poking through the hole in the membrane/shell and the white blip at the bottom of the hole is the eggtooth. At last check there were six babies and two more pipping. We even caught this little one making it's way into the world just as it tumbled out of it's shell and discovered the law of gravity.

They really are much, much cuter once they fluff up eh?

I'm shocked that this is a 100% hatch. First because their mum (Penny) definitely wasn't broody and the fellow who incubated the last lot was on holidays I was upset thinking I'd no choice but to turf them when I really, really need to build numbers. Then after the minor miracle of Lily the Silkie X going broody, the heat hit and if it was 42-43 outside, I shudder to think what that shed was my attempts to keep it relatively cool aside! Not to mention having great fertility this late in the season when earlier the fertility was a less than stellar 45-50% fertile at 8 days is just weird! I am *making* myself behave and not go peek at these babies until tomorrow to give everyone a chance to dry off and settle in. Meanwhile Lily is doing a great job being mum and is definitely protective of her little brood!