Welcome to our farm page! We love fresh eggs and love animals, so we decided to raise chickens for eggs! What started as 10 chickens in 2017 will be roughly 120 chickens in 2025! We pamper our chickens to keep them happy and healthy. If you are in the Camano Island area and you are welcome to come see the chickens and buy eggs if we have them!
As the 4th of July approaches, we can tell many part time Camano residents are here – requests for eggs have maxed out our current supply of eggs. We expect egg supply to pick up soon as a number of the broody hens and hens recovering from molting should start laying again soon.
MJ’s girls (and roosters) have had lots of changes recently! The chicks from March have reached the age where they can start eating “laying” feed – it contains more calcium needed when they start laying, which should be within the next few weeks. This meant we could merge them with the rest of the flock, so a new automated door was added to the covered coop and the chicks had access to all other chicken areas! The merge went fairly well – there were not really any big fights, except that the large mirror we put in the chicks area became a challenge for several of the roosters and a few hens. They thought some new chickens had been added to the flock and felt the need to challenge them. PB, our “alpha” rooster spent several days fighting with himself in the mirror. His spurs actually started to get a little bloody but he recovered, at least physically.
Mama May has been great with the new chicks – we have named the grey one Dora (after Dora the explorer) and Boots is the black chick. We learned that hens actually know how to take care of chicks from the start – whenever the chicks are cold or scared, they bury themselves in Mama’s feathers. Mama shows them what to eat and how to eat new things, even picking off pieces of corn to feed them.
One of our oldest hens here (Zinfandel was 7 years old) passed recent, which was a contrast to the new life brought to us with Dora and Boots.
Introducing June and July, our first successful chick hatchings! June and July hatched June 20th, and have slowly started coming out from under Mama May. We started with 8 eggs, we had at least 2 that did not survive pipping, 1 egg left intact, and three that broke during the incubation period. We definitely learned some things about setup and support, and this was also the first time for Mama May to actually incubate eggs.
Since our first (indirect) experience hatching seems to have been a success, we are going to hatch some chicks here! We have a number of broody hens so in theory, this should be easy. We have some photos of the first set hatched – 9 out of 11, which is pretty good!
We also had another interesting visit from a predator. After our recent experience with Dexter, we buried the dead chickens. Apparently, this was very interesting to at least one of the nearby coyotes and the buried chickens were dug up and removed!
