My Flock of Australorps.

Monday 30th November 2009.

We have a pen of mixed breed chooks that give us eggs and there is a rooster in with them so we get chickens but for a while now I have been trying to decide on a *real* breed to, well, breed. So...
On the 25 October I drove to Bunbury to buy some fertile Australorp eggs from a lady that sells them. I bought 2 dozen at $25 dozen so all up $50. She told me that she was getting a good hatch rate so was I confident of getting at least a dozen chickens from the batch.
We put them in my daughters incubator along with 18 eggs from here that were a mix of Hambough and Aracana.
Three weeks later they start hatching. Very exciting, I was going to get my flock of Australorps. How cool.
She ended up with a lot of chickens from her 18 eggs...I had 7 hatch but one of those died. So I have 6 chickens from 24 eggs. How sad was that! I cried.

I now have 6 Australorp chickens in a broody box in the bathroom and they are getting bigger by the day.
I wonder how many will be roosters but hope not too many, no more than 2 but going by the rooster rate from my other chickens it will be more than that. I have a couple of months before I find out for sure but fingers crossed the females will win.

Daughter sold her Hambough chickens for $10 each so she made money while I feel that my little lot have cost too much.
In saying that though, if I had of bought unsexed chickens at $10 each then I supose that I am ahead.

I did email the lady that I bought the eggs from and she has said that she will give me a dozen eggs because of the low hatch rate. She says she is getting more than 90% hatching and cannot understand why my lot didn't. She thinks it could have been the incubator.
However Hubby cracked the unhatched eggs open so that we would have some idea what the problem was and 11 of them were unfertile so I know it wasn't all our doing. Two were maybe fertile and 4 didn't hatch. That was the sad bit and we won't know what went wrong with them.
Hopefully the next lot will be better but I don't know when I will be able to pick them up.
It's going to take a while but I will get my Austalorp Flock up and running.
Now...Have to get Hubby to build me a foxproof house and pen out in the orchard. Time to be a nice little wifey. Better tidy up before he gets home.