After eyeing each other through the wire divide for a couple of days our big girls have finally met the new little hens on the block face to face -- or beak to beak as the case may be.
The "big girls" are our traditional house favorite, Buff Orpingtons a lovely, calm, heavy breed developed in England. This particular pair spends most of the day thinking about how pretty they are, and they are not wrong.
The new girls will be some stiff competition in the egg laying department. There are four Cuckoo Marans, silver speckled black birds that lay dark brown speckled eggs (or at least our last Maran did but others describe them as plain brown eggs). They are tribute to our dear, departed Connie, our first Maran and all in all a wonderful, sweet, gentle girl. Close relatives, our four new Copper Marans will, hopefully as they are supposed to, lay dark brown "chocolate" eggs. The darkest eggs of any breed. Two of the new batch are a recently introduced English breed, Cream Legbars. Not particularly pretty and a little slighter than the rest of the flock with silly little feathery mohawks these girls will lay robin's egg blue eggs. I could not resist that idea despite the rare breed price tag that went along with these two. Lastly rounding out the new group are two more creamy yellow Buff Orpingtons. James and I figure there should always be Orpingtons in the yard.
There was a little squawking and a couple of well placed pecks but otherwise everyone seemed more interested in a big dish of crumble than in each other.
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