Bantam Chickens!

My friend Kelly knew I was interested in finding some bantam (miniature) chickens to add to our backyard flock. She was at the Tractor Supply store yesterday and noticed that some would be arriving today. The store requires a minimum purchase of 6 birds so we went in together for the purchase (she got 3 and we got 4). Unfortunately the bantams are not sexed so roughly half of my new brood are probably male. We won't be able to tell which are which for several months...but when we do, we'll have to get rid of them quick. Like most towns, Davis doens't allow roosters within the city limits because they are too noisy.

I'll try to find a farm outside of town that is willing to take them...but otherwise we'll be having mini chickens for dinner sometime this fall.

Kelly knows how excited I am to finally get my much-anticipated bantams so she sent me a picture tonight. Aren't they cute? For now they are at her house but I should be able to pick them up on Friday or Saturday.We don't have names for all of these new gals yet, and we're open to suggestions! We'd like to keep the theme of foods that include chicken. (Remember, our current hens are Tikka Masala, Vindaloo, Noodle, and Tom Kha. We had a Nugget, but she turned out to a "he" so we returned him to the store since he was supposedly sexed before purchase.)

Here are our current ladies:And the eggs they lay:The bottom two are a bluish-green color from Noodle and Vindaloo. On the top are the brown eggs. Tikka lays the darker brown on the top right. Right now we get 3-4 eggs per day. Their ovulation cycle is longer than 24 hours so we don't necessarily get an egg from each every day. Some days we actually run out of eggs. Eddie usually eats two whole eggs for breakfast and if I do any baking we use a lot of eggs. Over the last few days, though, we haven't used many so when a nice Indian lady saw the hens in the front yard this evening and asked if I had any extra eggs to sell I decided to give her 6 for free.