Saturday, October 13, 2012

Blue Cochins

So some of you may have read bits about my growing chicken obsession. It pretty much started in Australia when I wanted a easily attainable and cheap to raise animal that was also fairly easy to get rid of for when I came back to Canada. Chickens fit this perfectly! But I refused to get just a white chicken, those are all we had growing up! So I went to a local Poultry Club Auction. There I fell in love with... Wyandottes! I think they're gorgeous! They were also ridiculously expensive there so I ended up getting a trio of Minorca's instead LOL

Either way, when I got back to Canada and decided to get some chickens here I began looking for Wyandottes of course! In this hunt though I discovered many more kinds of chickens that are just gorgeous and demanded I get them. The ones that stole my heart and my eye were the Cochins! You can't look at them without wanting to hug them or just bury your fingers in their fluffy feathers! However, since this was my first attempt at raising chicks on my own there were some hardships along the way. One of these took the form of a disease called Mycoplasma. After some serious research I decided it wasn't something to go to extremes over so none of my birds were culled and I have the medicine needed on hand for any relapses. One bird gave me a nearly 100% diagnoses based on visible symptoms though, and that was one of my standard Blue Cochins. The poor dear could barely see, had swollen eyes, runny nose, dirty feathers where she tried to scratch her itchy eyes and she was incredibly stunted! The other Cochin seemed to get away without experiencing any symptoms and carried on growing at a normal rate.

Originally I had taken this photo as a way to show the size differences between the two and HOW MUCH the sick chick had rebounded! In a before shot she was barely 1/4 the size of the healthy chick. She looked bad and she was very slow to feather out, while in this photo you can't tell she was ever sick and would just assume she's slightly younger. She's made leaps and bounds in growth and I'm very happy with it. Just like I was happy with how this quick shot turned out with the lighting and poses. The only thing I wish was different was that their feet weren't muddy so you could get a true idea of how fluffy they are!

Even lacking fluffy feet feathers they're still two beauties!

Enjoy!


No comments:

Post a Comment