yet another exciting Saturday

Or not, I might have been a bit sarcastic about that.

I did get to sort through all the chickens this evening, since tomorrow is auction day. I'm taking about 70 birds, but I don't know the exact number. Mostly youngsters, about 2/3 of them are males. At this point I'm focusing more on getting rid of obviously-bad birds, rather than paying much attention to the good ones. That comes later. Right now I look at combs, ear lobes, feather color, and leg color. I ended up culling out six REALLY nice colored BBRed pullets that all have inverted spikes. UGH!! It just kills me to do that, since good colored BBReds are few and far between, but I now have a zero-tolerance policy on inverted spikes. Even if they do pop out when they get older, I don't want those genes getting passed along. I've been told I'm too harsh about that, but... c'est la vie, as they say. Anyway, I'll still have WAY too many chickens and will definitely be taking a whole lot more to auction in August, but this will definitely help ease the crowding!

I narrowed the Crele birds down to five: two males and three females. But I'm still leaning toward scrapping the whole Crele thing. I'll give them a little more time to feather out and grow, but they are huge, poorly colored, and I'm just not sure I'm up for that much of a challenge, and I don't think I have the coop space to work on three new colors plus the ones I already have. The Cuckoos have somewhat more potential, but I'm not even sure yet I can make that color work. They are large but not as huge as the Creles, and also poorly colored. The youngest of the Silvers are not feathered out yet so it's hard to tell much about them, but dang those Blue Silver pullets are cute!

I'm starting to think seriously about going to the Nationals in Indiana this November. I'm 99% sure I would not take birds (don't want that hassle or added expense, and it's unlikely I'm going to have a whole lot of birds finished out by then anyway) but I hate the idea of missing what could be one of the last BIG shows. You know, "everybody" is going to be there. Shouldn't that include me?! ;-) We'll see, definitely nothing set in stone yet, but I really would like to be there. I wouldn't take art stuff for sale either, that's such a hassle, and enormously expensive.