Regarding my manliness and virility

I mentioned in my last post that I have six children. Please mentally add one to that number. Thank you. That is all.

Chicks Ahoy

We have nineteen chicks hatched thus far. Five more are pecking away at their shells. One didn't make it. We just pulled the hatched chicks from the incubator and moved them into the brooder. My sister's eggs are the slowest-hatching. Only one of her eight has hatched, and three are currently trying to get out of their shells.

The black copper marans are easy to sex when they're only a couple days old. The hens have a distinct spot on top of the head, while the roos don't. Of the black copper maran chicks, we have three roos and four hens.

The rest of the chicks are all half black copper maran and half something else... an assortment of hens other breeds produced the eggs: cuckoo maran, welsummers, australorps, buff orpington, and one high-strung leghorn. These should all be decent egg-producers in a few months.

Hatchery update

We have at least four chicks pecking their way out of their shells now, and one black copper maran that has completely hatched. I haven't been this jazzed since the birth of our youngest child. My oldest daughter is giddy, and can't stop giggling. Definitely worth doing... if you haven't hatched out chicks, do it!

My entrepreneurial kids

My wife and I were talking the other night about getting new chickens this year. We usually buy chicks from the local hatchery and raise them from a few days old. However, last year, we had quite a bad experience with the owner of the hatchery, and we've been talking about how to get new chicks some other way this year. It suddenly occurred to us that, since we have a rooster and a bunch of hens, we almost certainly have some fertile eggs; we could just hatch our own. It was quite an eye-opener to realize that we can actually produce not just eggs, but our own chickens. So, I started looking at incubators, and it turns out there are a lot of choices out there, but they're all expensive, and a lot of them are relatively low quality styrofoam deals. If we were going to strike out on our own, we didn't necessarily want it to be a more costly endeavor than simply patronizing the local hatchery.

It turns out that my next door neighbors had acquired an incubator from a friend of theirs, and had never used it. I went over one night and the husband and I dug it out and fired it up and all seemed to be in order. I brought it home and went about calibrating the thermostat and working out how to get the humidity high enough, which is quite a chore here; the wind blows a lot here, which makes for a very dry climate during the winter. Anyway, the incubator looks like some sort of kit built from extension service plans (similar concept to the wooden one here), and appears to be as much as 20-30 years old; I didn't have high hopes, but I persevered, and sure enough, we were able to get the temperature and humidity in the correct ranges for incubating eggs.

45 eggs ready to go into the incubator

By this time, the two oldest kids had hatched (get it?) a business plan: they would purchase fertile eggs, incubate them, then sell the chicks. We have a black copper maran rooster, so all of our hatched chicks would be half black copper maran. My wife got the notion that she wanted some pure black copper marans, so she started poking around on craigslist and found a family that sells fertilized eggs, both pure black copper maran, and black copper maran cross. She bought eight black copper maran eggs, and the kids bought a dozen more crossbreed eggs. My sister decided she wanted to hatch out some of her eggs to, so, within a week, we had 45 eggs ready to be incubated. The incubator we're using looks like it could easily hold 250 eggs, but since this was to be our first attempt, we decided to keep the numbers down, so as to minimize our losses (the pure maran eggs were $5 each, and we eat almost all of the eggs our own chickens produce).

On Bloody Ground

Abraham Covalt is my ancestor of the 9th generation, through my mother's father. I found this story of the settlement of the Terrace Park, Ohio area (close to Cincinatti) that references him and several of my other family members.

Pioneer settlers and Shawnee Indians fought and died for possession of what is now Terrace Park. The Indians almost won.

Five settlers were killed in little more than a year after Abraham Covalt, a Revolutionary War captain, established fortified Covalt Station here in January, 1789. The Indians lost only one. Two military expeditions suffered dismal defeat, and Covalt Station had to be abandoned over the winter of 1791-92. Of the Covalt Station men who joined the second military expedition, only [my great-uncle] Chenaniah Covalt returned.

The menace continued throughout the Miami area until an army under General "Mad Anthony" Wayne won a victory and then a peace treaty in 1795. But in the years between, four other men had been killed here. Four more were carried off as prisoners, and only one was ever heard of again. The usual lot of Indian prisoners was to be burned at the stake.

For a time, indeed, the land between the two Miamis was called "the Miami slaughterhouse." So harassing were the Indian raids that a committee of citizens of Columbia and newly-founded Cincinnati once offered rewards for Indian scalps "with the right ear attached."