Last week, on Friday, I received a Tweet from McMurray Hatchery noting that they were running a one-day special on several breeds, and the offer was 50% off of their normal pricing. One of the breeds included in the offer was Black Australorps. I had hoped that when Tractor Supply had their chick days, they were going to offer those, but our location never ended up getting any from the local hatchery supplier. I mentioned the special to George, but we never discussed it further. Later that evening, as we were getting the chickens settled in for the night, out of the blue, he pondered, “I wonder what it’s going to look like in here with 35 more chickens?” That man is full of surprises. 🙂 He ordered 30 females and 5 straight run, so we will likely get a couple of roosters out of that pentaverate.
Based upon what the representative had told George over the phone when he placed the order, we were expecting that we’d get the phone call from the Post Office this morning, or perhaps even tomorrow morning, to come pick up our peeping box of fuzzbutts. Much to our surprise, we received our call yesterday afternoon! So we hustled up to the main post office, and could hear our little babies all the way out in the lobby. They are all so very curious about the camera, it was impossible to get a photo of them without someone hopping in closely and throwing the focus off. So instead, I give you a video of them peeping away:
There is also a rare/fancy chick included for free in any order from McMurray, and we are trying to figure out what we have. Honestly, we might not know we had the extra, if it weren’t for our having counted them all and finding that we have 36. There is one chick with a yellow spot on its head that differentiates it from the others, so we suspect that’s our special bird. It will be interesting to see what breed it turns out to be!
Yesterday also brought another new arrival to our farm, a lovely Alpine doeling. She was not terribly thrilled with her ride home, but fortunately, it was not a long trip.
We did use a leash on her to get her from the truck to the barn, as she was quite nervous, and we weren’t sure if she’d try to bolt once we got her out of the carrier. She did hold still long enough on the truck bed for me to take this photo of her cute face.
She was greeted by the rest of the herd with suspicion; that’s goat politics for you. There was quite a bit of head butting, power plays, and even a WWE-style flying forearm smash, using their half-wall as the ropes! Our new girl didn’t seem to want to be the aggressor, however; she was just concerned with defending herself and standing her ground so that she wasn’t picked on. She got lots of reassurance from us, as did our other girls.
After about a half hour of watching them to insure there were no injuries caused, George questioned whether they might settle their differences over a bucket of grain. Sure enough, that was common ground that all goats could agree upon.
This morning, there is still some mildly challenging behavior toward the new girl, but she is definitely integrating into the group from all appearances. I’ll be keeping a close eye on things throughout the day to make sure everyone is safe, but they should be one big happy herd in the next day or so. I’m sure they will all commiserate well with each other tonight, because they will be getting their monthly de-worming shots, and that’s something else all goats can agree on: they hate it!
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