Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

And here is chick number two, discovered this morning all fluffy and dry so it had obviously hatched sometime in the night. Of the remaining three eggs, it looks as though there might be one chick still to hatch; one looks as though the chick had begun to grow and then died; and the fifth egg was not fertile. This is not a great hatch rate: from five or six eggs, we are used to getting four or five chicks BUT the only reason we are hatching is to give our broody birds the chance to be mums so we are not worried about numbers. In fact we DON'T want too many at all and it would be wrong to breed birds just for the sake of it. We usually sell a few chicks and then later we sell any older females as 'point of lay' (almost ready to start laying eggs, usually at 5/6 months). Cockerels and any remaining females end up as meat so it is always good to have a few for that purpose. We don't eat any meat we have not raised ourselves so if we do end up selling all our birds, we do without chicken for the rest of the year.
Anyway, seems a bit grim to be discussing eating birds when they have only just hatched so, moving on...
One of the reasons we always have different cockerels (this year we have a new Cream Legbar and an Indian Game) is because we enjoy hatching different coloured chicks. We never quite know what we will end up with but these two are wonderfully different both in colour and in size. It is going to be great to watch them grow. And we just love the way they run in under mum's 'skirt' to keep warm (you can watch this in the videos).