An egg is a lovely thing...

Seven Springs is pleased to announce the arrival of three new chicks.  They are absolutely adorable.  They arrived last Monday, approx. 3 days overdue.  You might remember from the last blog post that there were five fertilised eggs.  The other two eggs did not develop.  After doing some research there are apparently lots of reasons why this might be the case, including the ingress of bacteria which kills the developing chick if there is a crack in the egg.  In fact, there are lots of things that can go wrong with the 'natural' process of a hen going broody:
- the eggs may not be fertilised;
- the hen may abandon the nest part way through incubation;
- the eggs may not develop;
- the hen may attack the chicks as they are hatching;
- the hen may abandon the chicks soon after they hatch.
According to our research, there are no predictors for the calibre of mother a hen will make, she just has to have a go.  One thing does seem certain, if a hen is a bad mother once, then she will be again.  Thankfully this particular hen has turned out to be a good mum.

The chicks are now one week old and already they are noticeably bigger.  Ian is building a chook tractor which the mother and chicks will be relocated to in the next day or so.  

It's hard to get good help, fortunately Ian is a handy kinda guy.

Ian with workshop manager Foxy.

This is the first stage of integrating the new chicks into the flock, and broody chook back to the flock.  They can get close to the other hens and roosters, without being in danger.

In other news, and somewhat more mundane although picturesque, the dam pump was playing up the other day, not pumping water for some reason.  So Ian replaced the foot valve at the inlet pipe, and now all seems to be fine.  See?- handy kinda guy.

Looking approx NE towards the house from the top dam.