Chicken Diaries - New chickens that weren't what I expected

After the trauma of the previous day, I thought the best thing was to distract them with a new chicken. Not so they thought that Snowy was easily replaceable, nor was it to make them cheapen death, but I asked them if they would like another chicken and they said they did.

I responded to an ad on Gumtree which was selling a cheap chicken, but it turned out that they wanted all 3 to go together.  Oops, that wasn't part of the plan. Lose one and come home with 3? Now I havae 8 chickens!

These new chickens were all Isa Browns, good egg layers. However, I was surprised when I saw them because I saw something I hadn't seen before.

Debeaking.

It just meant that the sharp bit of their beak was cut off, but it still looked weird. Short little beaks.  At first I baulked, thinking these were mistreated chickens, but they seemed happy enough, just funny beaks.

So this is a sad picture of debeaked chicks. It's done with a hot iron/laser so it's cauterised at the end. Some say the beak grows back, but I don't really think it does.

These are my chickens. You can see their short beaks. Some are shorter than others...

Beaker

Peckachu

Puffy

Beaker has the shortest beak - she belongs to my daughter. Peckachu is my husband's chicken, and has white feathers around the neck, and Puffy is my son's chicken, and has a longer beak and is slightly more red than the others.

The good thing about having three is that the bullying is not as bad and they hang around together. They figured out food and water pretty quickly. I was naughty and didn't isolate them, but I did a lice check and didn't see anything. On the first night they slept separately but the second night I tried to get them to go up the coop and they slept on the ground of the coop instead. On the third night I manually put them up there and now they've figured out where home is.

They laid eggs the next day but they didn't know where to lay. I found eggs on the ground the day after I brought them home and also out in the garden the day after that. But once they figured out that the coop was home, they laid in the nesting box.

I can't tell whose eggs they are so it doesn't help me with my egg calendar. It's easy when there are 3 eggs! However they do lay quite big eggs compared to my other chickens, so that's one way to tell.

Welcome to the family, ladies!