This is Valentino my new Dun Serama Rooster. Dun is the name of the coloration he has. Dun is more of washing out any other color. So you have duller, more muted colors which can be very cool for the right look. 

I’m going to be breeding this guy and if his tail feathers grow back in time I’ll be taking him to a show soon.

So this weekend I got Seramas. (If you don’t know, Serama are said to be the worlds smallest breed of chicken.) All of them were aquired for specific breeding projects (Mille Fluer and Dun) except this fella who I just had to have when I saw him. I met someone on a the BYC board who is a Serama breeder and she was kind enough to get me started with breeding. She gave a friend and me several birds to get to going. Since I’m such a huge fan of Mille Fleur as a pattern I had to work on that pattern, and she had some gorgeous Dun birds I simply couldn’t pass up.

Anyway, this guy is named Napoleon. Because he’s tiny with huge attitude. His mottling is fantastic in my opinion. I just really love the way he looks. He’s young, around 4-5 months so one of the older hens I got tried to bully him around some. He had nothing of it. He dove in and showed that girl who was boss right away. He weighs in at a grand 8.5ozs. I don’t expect him to get much bigger which makes him in the smallest class of Serama.

We’ve been keeping him inside with us a lot because he wasn’t too tame yet and I’m hoping to show him this winter if he fills in early enough.

He started to really calm down eventually even fell asleep in my hands.

I’m going to give him a little time before I breed him. He’s given me reason to think he might not quite be genetically healthy, but he’s still my favorite right now.

We bought Rory here at about 3 weeks old in May. We thought he was a she, but he started showing some very roo-ish signs after a couple of weeks. Now it’s very clear that he’s, well a he. This is our first experience with such a young cockerel. We’re hoping we don’t run into any agressive problems. So far, he’s very friendly although a little skittish.

He’s gorgeous though. His feathers have a fantastic sheen to them and his tail can look like a myriad of colors as the light changes. Rory doesn’t want to act like a roo yet though. He steals food from his girls and doesn’t crow.  But he’s still young, approximately 16 weeks old.

We have several Black Walnut trees. These trees are interesting in that they lose leaves year round. They fall, bright yellow on the green grass and Fred gets very excited. He’s sqwaks and clucks calling the girls over for a delicious treat, only it’s a leaf. And they are all over the ground. The chickens don’t actually seem to like how they taste as they never actually eat them.

That doesn’t stop Fred from getting very exicted and letting them know everytime he finds one. It also doesn’t stop the hens from running over very excited to see his find only to wander away disappointed when they see it’s just another leaf.

As you all know last week we got our first egg. Teresa got the process started, but Julian made it infinitely more interesting. For one, she decided to use the nest boxes on the second story, which is a lot harder to get to but I’m pleased to see she likes it better. Second, she loves to make noise and brag about laying.

Teresa is a fairly low key chicken. She doesn’t make a lot of noise, ever. She seems happy enough just not the bragging type. Julian though, this past Saturday, decided it was time to lay an egg. So she starts sqwaking. Fred realizes what’s happening and runs over to be there with her in this fine hour.

They both jump up to the second level, and Julian starts digging around in the nest box. Fred stands directly in front of the nest box, as if on guard. After 10 minutes or so, they both jump triumphantly out of the nest box and start making quite the racket. Fred is loud and bragging for Julian. Julian is loud and brags for herself. After, a good 5 minutes of this Fred jumps down and takes his place out with the girls again.

Julian though doesn’t leave. But instead she jumps back into the nest box and starts scratching around again. Fred catches on and comes to join her again. Diligently on guard. After a good 30 minutes of this I’m about to leave and I’m super curious about what’s going on in there so I go to take a look.

When I pull up the egg door, Fred and Julian notice me and FREAK out. Justified I suppose, Julian is trying to “give birth” and here I am snooping. She hadn’t laid the egg. She spent the next 10 minutes making a whole lot of noise about being interrupted before finally going in to finish the deed for real this time. And there was once again, much rejoicing.

Image from Wikipedia Commons.

Yesterday the chickens were panicking. Some of them managed to fly out of their little pen. All of them though were running in absolute fear. Fred was making his “Danger, danger” call and the girls were listening and heading for cover.

The problem is that they were running from a Butterfly. Yes. A butterfly.

Our chickens are lazy! Well I imagine that’s the case anyway as none of them have laid an egg yet. I’m not sure how much of a sign of egg laying readiness this is, but Fred has been doing his business. Often.

There are a lot of girls so the love gets spread around, which is a good thing. He seems to have recently found himself excited about Jessie and she seems to have been generally receptive. It’s funny though occaisionally the girls at the top of the pecking order don’t usually like Fred showing interest in others.

Julian in particular has shown some jealous tendancies, chasing off Jessie and Camellia so she could have Fred to herself. Amusingly though it turns out that Fred is a bit small. He’s tried to mount Teresa in the past only to fall off halfway through. She’s a big hen and he’s well a small roo. I suppose it can work it’s just a bit more challenging for him.

It’s been about 20 weeks for Teresa and Julian and 16 weeks for most of the others. We *should* start getting eggs any time now…

I mentioned earlier that the new young chicks had sort of created their own flock. I’m not sure if it had to do with size, but I suspect that was at least part of the issue. They were often forced away from the food so that the bigger, older chickens could eat. I had to keep a close eye on things early on so I could make sure the chicks got enough food.

Rory seems to very purposefully keep them seperate. If anyone, me, other chickens anything comes close by they go running off somewhere else. You can see Rory there behind Fred forgaging all alone.

Rory has grown a ton in the last few weeks and I’d curious to hear him crow. He’s only a 9-10 weeks old right now though so he’s got some time. I just hope we don’t have any fighting over the girls, though there are enough for them each to have 7 or so. 10 or more each is generally recommended so we can just hope. Rory is getting some nice red streaks in his feathering now. I can’t wait to see what he looks like full size.

A new pet? Or just Fred?

A friend from work came by not too long ago and commented on how much Fred really looks like a Shih Tzu from behind. If you can’t see his head like this shot you really would probably assume he’s a dog. Of course that would assume he’s not making any noise.

I wonder if we could train him to be covert. Like the penguins in Madagascar who are more conspiracy theorists, but none the less: a covert chicken. I can see this working. He has instant camouflage. We all know that people are highly suspicious of small fuzzy cute chickens but small fuzzy cute dogs they assume to be harmless.