Meet my menagerie. :)

My new girls are finally laying YAH!! 🙂 it is freezing here at present and I thought they were going to wait until spring but no they have decided this is as good a time as any. I got my three new girls from a friend of mine in about December last year, they are a rare bread here in Tasmania they are called Weaten Marans there are a few different types of Marans as in color range the Weaten’s are the lightest of all the colors, but I think they are the only one we have here in Tasmania and not very many, they lay an amazingly dark brown egg it is said the darkest egg of all the chicken breeds.

In this basket are my Muscovy duck eggs and my first Weaten Maran eggs just Gorgeous!

They are not what I would call a big chicken which suites me just fine when I first started thinking about having chickens I really wanted to have at least one rare breed, I was looking at Lavender Aracanas and the Marans but I couldn’t get either for ages, at the time my friend was one of the only people with the Weaten Marans in the state but I had to wait for her to breed them up a bit.

My young Weaten Marans

All three girls

I ended up getting some fertile Lavender Aracana eggs eleven because the guy smashed one in transport, two of my older mixed breed girl were clucky so I halved the batch so both of them could become mums the problem was once one of the eggs hatched in each nest they left the nest so I ended up with only two chicks and I thought to myself I bet they are both boys! and they were, beautiful roasters but they ended up in the pot they were good too I cant have noisy roasters here.

My adult girls now laying eggs

Didn’t they change as they got older they look like different chickens altogether.

As much as I love chickens I love my Muscovy ducks more, they are way less precious and fussy they practically look after themselves, they are quiet and good natured and I can let them graze in my fenced off garden area because they don’t jump up on the raised beds which I’m trying to keep quarantined from the surrounding ground because I have a bad Oxalis problem, the ducks don’t dig like the chickens so they don’t toss infected dirt everywhere they just go around the raised beds and search out all the pest and mow the bits of grass and cloves around the garden beds they are fantastic. And I love duck eggs so after the chickens I have now die I will just keep duck in the future I think.