Hello Reader,

It started months ago, and innocently enough. I came home from our local Tractor Supply store with six tiny little chicks.

By the way, have you seen the containers most farm stores use to send home baby chickens? They are a flimsy sort of fold-up box that looks awfully similar to what you might find containing other chickens (of the breaded and fried variety). Can you imagine the thoughts of a tiny chicken being put into one of those? “Is it free ranging for me or am I a chicken nugget?”

No judgment here on the multiple purposes of chickens. I’m fond of a chicken nugget. I just have the same thought every time. And this is why philosophy degrees should come with warning labels. Baby chicks are not having soul-paralyzing existential crises when The Hand selects them from the Tractor Supply Bin.

My six little chicks came from nicely labeled bins. Four of the six girls developed exactly as those labels suggested they would. Two did not.

Now, I should say at this point that the primary purpose of these birds, often referred to around here as Seal Team Six, is to eat bugs and disturb parasite cycles as much as possible in the high traffic sheep areas. They are awesome at it. I didn’t really care a lot about their breeds except that they be good foragers, and all the labels at the store on all the tubs I was considering met that basic requirement.

I did not anticipate how focused I was going to become on the identity of these two mystery birds.

I “picked” an Easter Egger and an English Orpington. Chicken people will probably recognize that the Orpington should have become easy to recognize from size and the Easter Egger is a sort of wild card hybrid achieved by mixing other breeds to get some pretty varied results. I was looking for cheek puffs to figure out which was the Egger and mass for the Orpington.

I took pictures. A lot of pictures. I compared these pictures to websites. I uploaded them to ChatGPT. I repeated this process anytime there was any observable change in appearance. It became ridiculous. I knew it, didn’t care, and kept on taking my photos.

Folks, Seal Team Six is about 24 weeks old now, and it’s only in the last couple that I’ve determined (well, I’m pretty sure) that these girls are both Orpingtons, one Blue and one Splash. That sounds simple, but I’m telling you, each girl had a list of potential identities going for some time.

I loved watching them develop. I learned so much about what features help distinguish one breed from another, found helpful websites, became acquainted with chicken breeds I’d never heard of before, and fell down lots of entertaining rabbit holes.

All well and good, right?

You’d think so. But friends, I’m afraid I have uncovered a teeny tiny wee little hint of a possible obsessive behavior.

Because we ordered over 20 chicks a couple weeks ago. I didn’t see my friendly neighborhood Tractor Supply friend pick them out of a bin. They didn’t come with name badges.

I have the list of what I ordered, and I have an armful of fuzzballs, and that should be good enough. It really should.

Except that within my order, I took the super fun and exciting (and it really is!) option of choosing a “Ten Brown Egg Layer” pack. So, I have ten Pullets of Mystery. Four of the other girls are sort of like the Easter Eggers in that they’re hybrids derived from other breeds and have inconsistent results when it comes to appearances. So that makes 14 Pullets of Questionable Identity.

There are eight birds in this group of 22 that I can ID visually. The entire group is trying to figure out if the phone that appears in the brooder on a semi-regular basis is another chick, something to peck, or something that threatens their existence.

My iCloud storage is crying.

This week it became clear, in the best possible way, that the Pemberley Regiment would need even more reinforcements in their production.

Another Brown Layer Pack arrived in the mail Wednesday.

This time, I thought I would be efficient about my photos during intake. I would take photos of each chick, from views that would be most helpful in identification. I would get leg color, the number of toes, coloration, special markings, any feathers starting to poke through, etc. Mercy, did we get photos.

I have strong suspicions about six of them. But that’s a bit of a cheat, because they’re two groups of three. They have other possible IDs, and the other five (the hatchery kindly includes an extra in a neat program), have many possibilities. More mysteries to solve.

I love all of this, and at the same time, it drives me nuts. I love noticing slow changes, seeing new feathers pop out, observing different rates of growth, and watching coloring patterns emerge. I don’t want to rush that or miss any of the stages of it.

At the same time, I want the certainty of knowing who I’m looking at. I like names and organization and being able to categorize and mentally sort and label. I want to be able to watch and learn about a bird’s behavior and compare it to another of the same breed and see what’s individual and what’s common. I’d like to know when to start anticipating laying.

My knowledge is incomplete. There’s a possibility it may always be so with some of these girls. I think that will always drive me a little crazy.

But I also think that I’ll probably order the mystery pack again.

Greg's Got Questions

Thank you to those of you who participated in the poll last week.

This week’s winning question: Is the gestation period for all our sheep breeds the same?

​Yup.​

The general standard gestation period for sheep is 147 days. Most lambings happen within 144 to 152 days.

I’ve read that sometimes fine wool breeds tend to lamb a little on the later side than those bred primarily for meat, but the averages are still true. Best practices are to be on high alert starting Day 140 to be ready for especially early deliveries, which can happen with multiples. That’s January 25 for us, buddy.

This Week's Questions

(As a matter of procedure, the poll function takes you to another page to submit your vote, so if that happens to you, you’re on the right track!)

Question 1. Fell down? As in you “fell down lots of entertaining rabbit holes.” Is that really the most accurate representation of what actually occurred? “Willingly dived into” perhaps? Or maybe “sat down, crossed my arms, squeezed my nose shut, and skooched myself forward inch by inch until gravity sucked me down like I was on the steepest, fastest water slide at Oceans of Fun”? Come on now. Whatever happened to integrity in reporting?

Question 2. Supposing we did want to have “name badges” for each member of The Regiment, how might we go about doing that? How does an aspiring Chicken Shepherd mark these ridiculously interesting egg factories?

Question 3. You said you can visually ID 8 of the 22? What breed are they? I can ID our 3 breeds of sheep, but I’m totally lost on which is which when it comes to these hens.

Happy knitting!

Kiersten J

P.S. Pemberley Correspondence is beginning its first season this fall. Each month I’ll tuck a letter and a few small pieces of Pemberley into an envelope and send them your way.

If that sounds lovely, I’d love to have you join us.

P.P.S. You can find this and more of my knitting journal entries at KierstenJ.com.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reply to this email! I read every one!