Eggs

This weekend I became obsessed possessed with the need to find some new chicks. I'm not sure why this happened to me. Perhaps it was the fact that I ended up buying two dozen eggs from the store over the last week, I'm not sure.

If you know me at all then you know I have a strange quirkiness for owning the "slightly rare and/or unusual" (eg: Irish Dexter cattle, although they are not so rare anymore; Wirehaired Pointing Griffon, and now his replacement Clyde, the goofy Bracco Italiano).

On my quest for a "different" kind of chicken I remembered reading in another blog a commenter who has Speckled Sussex chickens. She mentioned how they are extremely friendly and lay nice brown eggs. As my search for this type of chick went on I stumbled across some other chickens that were categorized as rarish and brown egg layers.

Eventually I made a list of four breeds I was interested in. They were the Barnevelder, Marans (several varieties), Welsummer, and the Speckled Sussex. (You can do a Google Image search to see what they each look like.) They each had attributes I liked (which to me sounds slightly silly to say about a chicken!) and so the real search was on.

I checked a bunch of commercial hatcheries and most were sold out for 2009, or they didn't carry the breeds. I'm one of those people that when I get something in my head (and it's not too expensive) I really want it now!

What to do next? Why, e-bay of course!

I've looked on e-bay before, just browsing things like jewelry or cow bells, but have never purchased anything there. The only on-line auction I ever did was about 15 years ago from a video auction site when I won a VHS of the movie "The Final Option" (called "Who Dares Wins" in Britain).

So guess what? They really do sell everything on e-bay! Some of the prices for some of the fertilized eggs were already too steep for me, so I found a couple of egg auctions that hadn't yet gone too high, and that were scheduled to end fairly soon. I watched and waited until virtually the last minute and made my move, but was outbid. That's when I learned about the automatic bidding. Also, I hadn't yet opened my PayPal account so I vowed to do better on the next one. I got ready to go and again, in the last seconds entered my bid. Someone else had done the automatic thing and I was outbid again, but I had enough time to post one more bid and I won. (Or as my friend says, You didn't "win"; you "bought" something. I prefer to think I won!)

I received my precious 6 + 2 eggs today. (I've learned that most egg sellers will usually add about 10% eggs in case of breakage during shipping.) They came in a big box.

Each egg was carefully individually wrapped, first in a paper towl, then bubble wrap, then a sheet of newspaper.

Then they were placed in the big box of shredded paper. I was afraid that I would break one just trying to unwrap them all!

Here is a picture of the unwrapped eggs with a white egg from one of my leghorns. I didn't have any brown eggs to really compare. But you can get a good idea of just how dark brown these eggs are.

I had contacted a neighbor a couple of houses down who raises quail and pheasant. He has an incubator and he said I could use it if I needed to. Fortunately for me one of the banties I adopted from next door just got broody. I replaced each of the eggs she was setting on with a "Wheaton Marans" egg. I didn't feel like getting pecked so I wore gloves for the transfer procedure.

Now hopefully in 21 days we'll have 8 new baby chicks. And all but one will be pullets!

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

PS-Did you know there are actually several on-line auctions dedicated to selling poultry and poultry eggs? Just Google "egg auctions" and you'll see. Who knew?