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Week by Week Photos
See photos of our Black Sex Link chicken, Trick or Treat, as a day-old baby chick and week by week through her growth and development!
Meet Trick or Treat!
Trick or Treat is our Black Sex Link chicken (BSL for short) and for some reason she actually grew up to have these cute tiny wings that look all Halloween-ish, or like a crow, so ultimately, she grew into her name. Her wings have this scraggly appearance at the ends and we have talked it over with the farm we adopted her from as well as done copious amounts of research. It’s possible it’s a hormonal issue or she had an infection of some sort she was born with that stunted her feather growth as well as her egg laying. We’ve never seen her pick at her feathers…or lay an egg! She’s very healthy and happy otherwise.
She is a beautiful bird with glossy black feathers that shine iridescent green in the light, and black feathers with veins of orange around her head and down to her shoulders. Her eyes are an amazing glowing yellow-green and her comb and wattles the reddest red. The pupil of her eye may have been pecked when she was a chick and has a unique black streak coming out of it.
She is also one in a trio of black hens that follow the old adage, “Birds of a feather will flock together!” Other members are Zelda, our black Australorp, and Queue, our black Cuckoo Marans.
She loves to engage you in a conversation and her way of talking with you is to whir and then sometimes she also lets out an unladylike honk, which I find really funny because she is so elegant and proper in her stance and then lets out this big honk like a goose! It just doesn’t fit her, but it makes me laugh every time! She is super sweet and tame, and will sneak up on you because she is so fluid and quiet in her movement.
I cannot tell you the number of times I have been playing in the garden, only to look up and suddenly be surrounded by the flock of completely still chickens, eagerly looking at me, staring. It’s an almost eerie, ear-ringing silence. Kind of like when the zombies are closing in on his girlfriend and Michael in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video and he then suddenly turns and looks at his girlfriend, only this time as a zombie himself. I guess I’m saying that suddenly I’m surrounded, and Never. Even. Heard. A. Peep. SO glad I am not raising lions!! Back to raising chickens!
We’re still waiting for Trick or Treat to start laying consistently. We thought she laid some eggs around 22 weeks, but have not really seen many since then, even though she hangs out in a nesting box each day and has, on numerous occasions, run around making bamboo nests and then actually nesting in them, panting and all.
She’s currently 22 weeks old, so maybe her hormones are telling her to practice and a regular laying schedule will be worked out soon! There are often 1-2 soft, broken eggs on the coop floor under the roosts each morning, and it is hard to tell which chicken(s) they are from…only time and much patience on our part will tell!
An Update
Trick or Treat is still unable to lay eggs, the poor dear! She still tries with great enthusiasm every day and sits in the dark of the nest box for a long time. She loves to sit on any other chicken’s eggs, and we’ve even put some fake plastic eggs in the nest box for just this purpose—so she can enjoy her nesting time!
On the advice of the farm we adopted her from, we treated her with a course of antibiotics but have yet to see any changes so they have recommended a second course. Hopefully that will help her! She is so desperate to lay an egg, and if we had a rooster, she would make an amazing mom!
Synchronized High Jumping
Photos of Trick or Treat, Our Black Sex Link
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