Replacement bike and a conversation with a cop

So there I was in Newark with a deceased bike. I don't have much of a prospect for getting it running or replaced any time soon. My dear sweet (she wanted me to add smoking hot, but I don't want to make Jack drool) wife offered to let me use her 600cc Honda Shadow as a loaner. She calls it a Harley wannabe, and that's a pretty good description. Low-slung, V-twin, small tank, chrome and shiny red paint, and uncomfortable. Last fall I attempted to rebuild its carburetor (without success, hence my reluctance to attempt working on my own bike), and this spring I got it done right by a professional, so the bike was running fine.

This is about what Val's bike looks like

[Interruption—my wife just called and I told her I was working on this post. She told me that she had said "smoking hot wheels," not "smoking hot wife." Myself, I like the wife version better.]

So I loaded a few things into a duffel, strapped it onto the wannabe, and headed south. You might be aware that route 50, with the Bay Bridge, is a major route between the entire greater DC area and the ocean. You probably also realize that Sunday afternoon is when all these people return home. Bumper to bumper, stop and go for miles. Motorcycles don't do well in this kind of traffic, —and the bike has a small tank, too, remember? Criticize me if you will, but I slipped onto the large left shoulder and carefully (25mph) got the bike into some airflow. And passed about a million cars and trucks. And a clutch of kids on crotch rockets, two of whom decided to follow me. I'm sure I saved more than an hour of travel time (but that's neither here no there, right?), not to mention the possibility of running out of gas. Eventually the kids switched to the right shoulder and were gone.

Eventually I saw a highway patrol car in the median.

I decided to seize the bull by the horns, as it were, and do a little motorcycle PR. I parked near the crossover and approached the patrolman. He was monitoring the eastbound traffic and didn't see me. I could make out through the slightly tinted window that he was playing solitaire on his laptop while he waited to his radar to buzz. I tapped on the window and he cleared the monitor and rolled down the window. I explained that in the traffic I was anxious about the bike overheating so I had been going down the shoulder, carefully. Can I do that? He looked at me (a distinguished-looking guy with grey hair and full riding gear), and he looked at the bike 20 feet away, and said. "Well, let me put it this way. I'm not going to stop you." I thanked him, promised to be careful, and went my way. Nice guy. I hope he got his quota.

A bad day for my bike

The two of you who read this blog probably know that I have a job in Annapolis and commute home to DE on weekends. Last Sunday I rode home to join the family for our boy's high school graduation party. In preparation for that trip, by the way, I had visited Bob's BMW and gotten an oil change and a new back tire.  You might recall that I had the clutch replaced a month or two back, so the bike was in pretty good shape. I thought.

About 25 miles from the house, tooling north on I-95, the bike suddenly lost power. I headed for the shoulder, thinking something electrical must have happened, but the bike kept running, and except for the loss of power, it sounded okay, so I figured the closer I got to the house, the better, so I kept going. I got all the way home. Later, after the bike cooled down,  I poked around, checked the oil, and couldn't see anything bad. I started the bike. Still ran weakly, but the exhaust felt the same on both sides. I called my buddy, Davis. He asked a couple questions  took note of my mention that I could detect a little oil at the end of the right exhaust. He said pull the right spark plug, so I did. Ordinarily, when you unscrew a spark plug, once you crack it loose, it's easy to unscrew. Not this one. I was afraid it had been cross-threaded. That wasn't the case. Here's what the end of the plug looked like:

I still have this in my pocket, as a souvenir. Ask and I'll show it to you.

My bike had run smoothly, if weakly, for 25 miles on one cylinder. It was too late to attempt further diagnosis, and I had to get back to Annapolis, so I borrowed a spare bike from Davis. When he saw the plug, he expressed his astonishment several different ways, none of which are repeatable in this family-friendly blog.

Today Davis and I took off the right cylinder. This is a fairly easy thing to do on these old BMWs. Here's what the inside of the head looks like: 

The mechanically inclined among you will notice immediately that the exhaust valve is missing, and the surface has been battered. 

Here's a view of the top of the piston:

Obviously something banged around in there a bit, and at about ten o'clock you can see the blackness of a hole punched clear through the poor piston. 

The valve itself was nowhere to be found. The sides of the cylinder appear undamaged.  Near as we can figure, the valve managed to escape through the exhaust port and it's resting somewhere in the exhaust header or muffler. 

sigh. Anybody interested in a parts bike? Except for the right cylinder, it's in pretty good shape. Oh. I'm in the market for a BMW K series with a full fairing.

May 2011 ride report

Yes, folks, sometimes I actually write about motorcycles. Yesterday was my chance to take a ride worth writing about. Among other clubs, I belong to a motorcycle club called something like the Mac Pac Riding and Wrenching Society, mostly BMWs and mostly eastern PA, though the club flag has appeared in many places, including Afghanistan.

So anyway. One of their number (Clay Owen), besides having a BMW much newer than mine, owns one of those holes in the water into which he pours money. It's a nice 35 to 38-foot (depending on how you measure and who's asking) single-masted sailboat. He invited me to stop by and pay him a visit, so I did. He keeps it in Oxford, MD, a little more than an hour from Annapolis by motorcycle through nice green eastern shore countryside. Apparently he doesn't read this blog, or he would have seen reports on my ride summer before last; he asked whether he was too far away for me. With a wrong turn that took me to St. Michaels—a worthy side trip itself—I got there in just under two hours.

Here's a picture of his boat. This is a stereo view. If you cross your eyes so the pictures superimpose, the middle image is 3-dimensional.





















His wife, Leslie, made that green rain cover over the aft part of the boat herself, by the way, and she makes impressive rope mats for Christmas presents. See 38 photos of the boat and the area here.

We ate at the local sports bar, where I had a fairly good buffalo burger, got to watch the Preakness—a lot of hoo-ha over a two-minute horse race, and met two young ladies, who, when they found I knew MC riders in PA asked if I knew a guy named Jack. They asked me to send him their picture.

I took back roads there, and a little ferry across the bay going back ($6.00). Sorry, no pictures of the ride (I was busy ahem riding). Take my word for it, Rt 622, essentially parallel to Hwy 50, is pleasant. The roads,  the boat, and the hospitality were worth the trip.

A hard week

Last week I was able to go home for the whole week. I was a witness for the state of DE in a felony construction fraud case, but they worked out a plea bargain, so I had the whole week free. Email me and I'll tell you about it. Or you can read some about it at the blog Inferior Building Services.

I couldn't waste the week lazing around with a whole two-acre microfarm to fix up, and I managed to keep myself fairly busy. Let's start out with a summary that should make all my motorcycle buddies groan, especially Jack. I wrote a poem about the week:

My "Vacation" from "Work"
Slaving away under noonday sun
Sawing up planks—I've just begun.
Building raised beds for our vegetables green,
The finest raised beds that you ever have seen.
Fifteen low squares each four feet by four.
Please, dear wife, don't ask for any more!
Fill them up with dirt and I'm still not done:
I have to build a fence for the chickens and their run.
Fifty feet long and six feet high,
Neighbor dogs can't see them and the chickens can't fly.
I worked and toiled and sweated like a man,
But I lost five pounds and I gained a nice tan!

I also got to dig a trench that became a nice asparagus bed. It was a productive week.

Click to enlarge

Speaking of chickens, here's a shot of the interior of the addition to the chicken coop, which we call the sun room. Val painted the trompe l'oeil. The room serves as a retreat for hens with newly-hatched chicks. We have three hens sitting at the moment; they should be good for maybe 20 more chickens. Come fall we'll be swimming in eggs, if you'll pardon the awkward metaphor.

It was daytime, so it's hard to see the little yellow flame

If you follow this blog, you might remember a series of several posts recently about biochar. The series starts here.

Biochar is homemade charcoal. You powder it up and mix it with your garden soil and it encourages the growth of beneficial microorganisms. It also sequesters carbon, permanently. Good stuff. I had four nice bags of sawdust from a neighbor's woodworking project I had saved all winter so I could make another batch. I managed to burn up a lot of scrap wood, and the barrel of biochar turned out nicely. Lots of nice fluffy charcoal that wouldn't need to be crushed into powder. I hosed down the contents of the barrel until I was sure everything was nice and wet, then turned in for the night. This was my first project for the week, and it took all day. I have several pictures on the previous posts, but here's one showing the gases escaping and burning off.

Chickens and some scrap wood

The next morning I checked the barrel to find, to my chagrin, an inch or two of charcoal in the bottom! Lesson 1: I needed more water. The charcoal was above combustion temperature, and when the air worked down to some still dry charcoal, it ignited, drove off the water, and it all burned up. Lesson 2: I should have spread out the charcoal immediately so it would cool, maybe onto the area I wanted to enrich, and hosed it all down more thoroughly. It was a lot of effort down the drain. However, we still have a lot of scrap wood to burn. Anybody out there got a big pile of sawdust?

New guy in town part 2

(If you haven't already, go read the previous post.) Being the new guy in town has brought several new experiences into my life:

• I now patronize four new coffee shops. Five if you count the one in Borders.
• I'm learning new geography (more on that in a future post).
• I get lost a lot, as in an extra 15 minutes roaming around in the rain on the motorcycle this evening trying to figure out where I am. With my rain gear in the side carrier.
• I get to say "I've never been here before in my life," a lot. This creates one of two reactions in the clerk on the other side of the counter. Either increased politeness and cheerful hospitality, or thoughts along the line of  "Hey, a new sucker!" The former raise their eyebrows, the latter lower them. 

I also make new friends, and that is what this post is about.

My new job is in a smallish office building, about the size of a standalone doctor's office. We occupy the first floor, and the dozen or so folks here are mostly youngish (compared to me), extremely competent geeks. For example, they get math jokes. (Picture the letter pi telling the square root of minus 1 to "get real." That's pretty funny.)  I just finished a glossary of their technical terms. It's 11 pages long. They speak in abstruse languages like Ruby, Scrum, OOP, Jira, and yaml.To their credit, they seem impressed with my German, Greek, and Hebrew.

My colleagues are mostly guys, though one is a slender blonde who wears her hair in glorious, curly disarray. She has a knack for pointed (read piercing) wit; she's better at it than the guys, and they hold her in respect—or fear. One fellow, who prefers a diminutive name, could fit the nickname "Goldilocks" except his hair is black. Another happens to be from the neck of the woods where I came from, and he's actually normal. My wife snickers whenever she hears that someone is from Elkton, the town just over the border in Maryland. Another of these colleagues has a beard long enough that he could fit right in with the Amish. Another, whose name ends with a q, taught me to say "how are you" in Bengali. Every one of them has something really interesting in their background.

Bucky Balls

They all play with little rare-earth magnetic spheres called bucky balls. You should see the shapes they make. I saw a stellated icosahedron (look it up) and a TIE fighter. They won't make into a nice moebius strip, though.
I feel honored to be invited when they go out for lunch, which is often at Annapolis' big mall, just across the street. The street happens to be the town's main drag, and it has no provision for pedestrians. They call crossing the street "playing Frogger."

Usually the food court is busier than this

We go to the food court, every man for himself, then find a table, and eat. Conversation is lively and they don't talk about work. They even listen when I contribute.  They're not too good at one kind of math—they guessed my age at somewhere between 58 and 72.

New in town

I recently made a long-term temporary change of residence. I landed a contract in Annapolis, and I have no wish to spend the gas or time to commute 80 miles each way through Baltimore and DC traffic to get there, so I found a reasonably-priced room to rent, and I commute home on weekends. Too many chores up there to just stay down here, and besides, I like the company of my wife and kids.

My calculator collection, brought down by my dear sweet wife.

I eventually sent the bike home. The road between this place and the office is not bicycle friendly.

Here's a shot of the door I leave through on my way to work. The paper above the lock is a reminder to turn off the alarm. I leave rather early in the morning, and my landlady likes to sleep in. And the alarm is really loud when I accidentally trip it.

Here's a view of the outside of my door. The house is a colonial with a walk-out basement. The back yard looks like a good place to have a barbecue. I haven't asked my landlady about it yet, but she's pretty nice. Maybe we can grill out when the whole family comes down. 
 The house is at the far end of a development, requiring a half-mile ride in the wrong direction to get to the public streets, though I could go down the embankment at the back of the property to the street and save myself a mile hike if I 'm walking. But the road isn't very pedestrian-friendly, either.

Annapolis is a town, a far cry from our microfarm. It's the capital of Maryland, but it has a strong small-town flavor. And I've found several interesting things worth reporting, not the least of which is a diner called Chick and Ruth's. So more later.  Come visit me!

How to build a campfire, part two

A bonfire is typically big and tall, and usually fairly short-lived. What if you want a campfire that's steadier and lasts longer? You'd want this for camp ceremonies and programs, for instance. You construct a different arrangement of wood for this.

As always with firebuilding, gather your wood ahead of time (I'll wax polemic about that when I talk about cooking fires). But read on to see what to gather.

Start with several fairly straight, large diameter logs. The biggest you're likely to need are a foot in diameter and a yard long. The more alike they are, the better. Snuggle them side by side in the middle of your fire pit.

Now arrange several slightly smaller-diameter logs crosswise on top of your bottom layer. They should be about the same length as your bottom logs, but slightly smaller diameter. Since they're smaller diameter, you'll need more of them to cover the bottom logs.

Layer three: crosswise to layer two, slightly smaller diameter, still the same length, and enough of them to cover layer two.

Repeat until your pile is a table about waist high. This makes a fairly large, long-lasting fire that'll still be smoldering in the morning. Scale it down to suit your group. Don't give in to the temptation to make the layers shorter as you go up. That'll create a pyramid effect. You want nice straight sides. Something knee high and two feet across will last as long as most campfires need to last.

The photo shows a small one I made for the photo, so the teepee igniter on top looks disproportionately large. I let my top layer hang over, too. If you trim their length, your pile will look nicer, but the fire doesn't care either way. I'll also never light this one because it's on a concrete slab in front of our house, not in the fire pit. It's pieces are destined for our wood burning stove that we heat our house with. (Total heating bill so far this year: zero.)

The top layer is a nice fairly flat surface of sticks maybe an inch in diameter. On the center of this put a pile of tinder and build a teepee of small sticks over it, then larger sticks, then larger sticks.  You should have a space between the sticks somewhere so you can get to the tinder with your torch match. Make the teepee fire stack a good foot high. You want a fire that will catch the top layer underneath it.

When you light this, the teepee fire will get going nicely, and the fire will work its way down the pile of wood, burning steadily the whole time.

When you conduct the campfire ceremony, try to get most of the people on one side of the fire, and you stand on the far side of the fire as you lead the singing or tell stories. That way the light from the fire makes you visible. If you're on the same side as the group, you're silhouetted and hard to see. You can also scorch your backside.

Next time: how to build a cooking fire.

How to build a campfire

Campfires are of two types. This kind is called a bonfire. It burns big and tall, and fairly quickly settles down to a quieter bed of coals perfect for toasting marshmallows, which, by the way, you should always toast with a wooden stick. metal hot dog forks get hot and melt through the marshmallow, making it impossible to turn for a nice, even toast.

The secret to this kind of fire is to use a lot of small wood, especially long stuff, like brush. some tall weeds is good. All that Multiflora rose you pulled up over the summer and put into a pile is perfect. Tree trimmings, dead branches. The skinnier, the better.

Start with a nice bundle of tinder, such as crumpled paper, wood shavings, tar paper, waxed paper, and so on. You can do something like tear off the end of a shoe box and fill it generously with stuff that can't help but catch fire and burn with a decent flame for at least a minute. Put it so you can get to the open end after you've piled all the wood over it.

Arrange the wood as steeply above the starter box as you can. It doesn't have to look like a teepee, but use a teepee of long sticks propped around the outside to help hold the pile up. The key is narrow and tall. And small diameter. The branches around the outside should be fairly sturdy, though.

Here's a picture of a finished bonfire pile. The pile in the middle is old grapevines, brambles, some tall weeds we cut down, all nice and dry and crackly. I used some branches that I had trimmed out of some trees to prop it up with.

You can't see it, but I hid something about the size of a shoe box at the bottom that would start the fire remotely. In the dark evening, I would be able to make it look like the fire started all by itself. I'll show how to make one of those devices in a couple posts.

When you ignite a fire like this, the fire very quickly develops an updraft from the combustion. The fire travels up the burnable material rapidly, and the draft carries flames even higher. This pile is about as tall as a person, but the flames can reach twenty feet high. It doesn't stay that big for a long time, and the outside ring of sticks eventually fall across the fire pit. You and the others can poke the fire with them.

Traditionally you are supposed to start a fire with no more than two matches. I've done it that way so many times, I just take a torch to the starting box, or pull the secret string. That way I don't have to worry about the wind blowing out my matches.

Now for sunset and a couple good ghost stories.

Biochar attempt: The Results

So the next morning I went out to check on my barrel.

next morning. You can see the cart in the background

You can't see it in the photo, but smoke was coming out the seam around the lid! Charcoal inside had been burning all night! Was any left? I rolled the barrel out and stood it up, but didn't remove the lid lest I create a large flame with the sudden introduction of lots of air. I went inside and returned with a large bucket of water. Carefully opening the lid produced only easier exit for the smoke. I poured water all over the contents. Didn't hear any hissing, but the smoke began to dissipate. And things looked pretty black in there. Whew.

Speaking of whew, the aroma was fairly acrid.

I muscled the barrel onto a cart and wheeled it to the compost heap. Biochar needs to be seasoned for a couple months to absorb moisture and get intimate with its underground surroundings.

Here's a shot of the charcoal, perched on a stick on the rim of the barrel: Looks like grass and twigs, doesn't it? I suppose if I had put a (dead) goat inside, I would have gotten a piece of charcoal in the shape of a goat.

I really should have crunched up the charcoal while it was in the barrel (the finer the powder, the better, I'm told, and the hard interior of the barrel would have helped the crunching.) but I wanted to see how the sticks in the bottom had fared. In the top I could see a fair amount of still brown material—I think I hadn't cooked it long enough. the unpyrolyzed material will decompose and contribute to the compost, so it's not a big deal. Just the same, next time only dry stuff goes in.

So here's what the sticks and paper looked like. I took the hose to it and eliminated whatever was still smouldering.

I mashed everything up as best I could, added some manure-laced straw from the chicken coop and mixed it together. This spring we'll put it on the gardens.


I want to try another batch. The actual pile of charcoal I ended up with wasn't very large. I have several feed sacks full of nice dry sawdust, and a friend with Peace Corps experience making charcoal who might have some advice for me. I'll let you know how I do next time. Speaking of next time, I invite your comments and suggestions.

More on how to make biochar

Step 2. Fill the barrel. I started out with a pile of sticks Val had collected in the woods, but realized that sticks take up a lot of space, so I broke them up into pieces. I hunted through our recycling bins and pulled out all the newspaper I could find. Then I remembered the pile of weed chips from our chipper up on the septic mound, and I gathered the long decorative grass we had trimmed away too. I think this was a mistake—some of this material was damp, and the need to boil off the water delayed some of the pyrolysis. This is how the pieces of sticks looked:

I filled up the barrel with stuff, shaking the chips down among the grass stalks and sticks. I laid the paper along the holes in the side, figuring they would hinder the entrance of air later.

Step 3. The fireplace. I used the BBQ pit where we had cooked a goat a couple years back. (Digression: We stopped having those BBQs while we waited for our addition to be finished, so we wouldn't have a mob of guests and a construction site together. Go to http://inferiorbuilding.blogspot.com for an update on that fiasco.)
I dug out all the old ashes, scraped the old unburned wood to the side, and arranged some fire brick to support the barrel on its side, holes down, where they would be in the fire. When the gases started to come out, they would ignite and contribute to the heating.

The technical term for fire brick is refractory brick

You can see the goat shed in the background

Step 4. The fire. You already know how to build a fire, right? (Actually, I'm planning a post that teaches how to build two types of bonfires.) We have a large number or cut-up pallets, not to mention more piles of sticks from the woods. My total fuel for the evening was two cartloads of pallet pieces and a cartload of sticks. Here's how the fire looked at the start and how it looked after I got things going. It took pretty much constant supervision, mainly because it was light wood that burned down fairly rapidly.

There's plenty of fire below and along the sides, too

Horizontal sticks weren't as good as vertical ones

This evening was the Civil Air Patrol Cadet Ball at the Dover AFB, so I lost use of the camera for the later stages, when you could see gases streaming out the holes into the fire under the barrel and along the band that held the lid in place. Eerie blue flame. It was pyrolyzing!

Total burning time was about five hours, then I let it burn out and cool down overnight. Next post: the results!

Fire, but not in the hole

Recently I learned about burying charcoal in your garden as a way to improve the soil. The charcoal doesn't contribute nourishment or decompose (ever!) but it holds water and makes nice little apartments for microbes and root hairs. When the microbes and root hairs flourish, you have fertile soil.

Of course anything natural has to be a lot of work, right? You don't just go burying a bag of briquettes under the pansies, especially not the kind that you can light with a match. Commercial charcoal is laced with chemicals that don't contribute to soil nourishment. (There is a brand out there, that looks like wood-shaped pieces of charcoal, that you can use. But there's a better way; keep reading.)

First, class, a vocabulary lesson. Our word of the day is biochar. It's charcoal made from pretty much any organic material, but mainly things like sticks and paper. Biochar is almost pure carbon, it looks like whatever you used for your raw material, only black, and you can mash it into powder.This powdered biochar is what you're supposed to bury in your garden.You make it by (second word of the day) pyrolizing the material. That means you heat it above combustion temperature without oxygen, so it can't burn. All the parts that can convert to gas do so, and you're left with the leftover carbon—biochar.

So. Something that improves my soil, sequesters carbon, and involves playing with fire and creating flammable gases. What's not to love? I decided to make some.

Step 1. I need a container I can heat a bunch of burnable debris in that can stand the heat and keep out the air. A 55-gallon drum (with lid) is perfect. I punched some holes along one side to let the gasses out. Here's what I ended up with.

I used the cold chisel to punch the holes.

Step 2. Tell you what. Click the RSS link or subscribe to this blog so you won't have to come back to catch the rest of this. You wouldn't want to miss any of my deathless prose, would you? More in the next post.

Portrait as promised

In the last post I promised to get a picture of the proud Papa of the new chicks. Actually, he pretty much ignores them. I think he's mainly interested in the adult hens.He is a pretty good rooster. He lets the hens eat first. He and I also have an understanding. I'm also a rooster, but I can whup him, so he doesn't challenge my right to be in the chicken yard. However, he doesn't have this agreement with the ladies of the house, and he'll sneak up on them and —ATTACK! Carol, our live-in city girl guest, won't even go into the yard now. But she does stand at the gate and voice imprecations at him. She's like the lamb on the roof telling the wolf how bad he is.

The chicks are doing fine, by the way, cheeping merrily and making Mom nervous when they scoot through the fence and she can't follow. They don't seem to mind the chilliness lately, either. They can also hop over the threshold into the coop through the chicken door. With all our previous batches of chicks we had put a ramp there so they could get in and out. We needn't have bothered. After all the time-consuming TLC we gave our previous batches, I think a rooster and mother hen is definitely the way to go. No more 3AM feedings, no chicken smell in the living room, no plaintive cheeping—I think they were bored in the nice brooder we rigged up for them.

Next post will be something completely different.

I'm a little chicken

Can it have been so long? I suppose when you write for a living, it can be hard to find time to write recreationally. Check those tweet links on the right for a few examples.

About the time of the last post, one of the hens decided she wanted to sit on some eggs. We chicken people call this being "broody." It took her a day or two to decide which nesting box to sit in, and I moved the eggs accordingly, but with a dozen hens, new eggs can appear in the batch, so we weren't sure how many, if any would hatch. She finally settled on one in the upper level. We had occasionally caught the rooster doing his duty (it takes about one second per hen) so in theory that's only about 12 seconds a day, but occasionally we heard these peculiar squawks...

Last Sunday I got an early start on the yard work and had to run an errand out in the far shed, which is one third hen house. I had disturbed a Chickadee (as usual) so I was used to being scolded, but on this occasion the cheeping sounded different. I checked the coop, and there was a little peeper on the floor, all lonesome and forlorn. I stuck him (or her) back under Mom, and discovered a brother (or sister) snuggled underneath too. By the end of the day we had seven. On Monday the hen rolled two eggs out into the droppings bin under the perches. Later I disposed of them.

We fill the nesting boxes with straw piled onto old cafeteria trays that I had scavenged from the dining room at Dade Behring a few years back. So that evening we arranged a protected corner on the floor, and it was easy to slide the nest out, hen, chicks, and all and put them down where no one would fall. She took the trip calmly, and the chicks immediately set out to explore their new surroundings.

I'm told that a mother hen will drive off any of her companions who show too much interest in the chicks, and apparently the other hens are aware of this, too, because I haven't seen anyone bothering them. Everyone is taking the new arrivals in stride.

Here's a family portrait. It's pretty hard to get all seven to poke their heads out at once.

Val said today that she can distinguish differences. Two are obviously darker, two are showing furry legs, so they are Cochins, and another appears to be a Wyndot like mom. Two appear to be connected to the Rhode Island Red lineage. Since the hen pretty much got one day's production, it's reasonable that she got one from each of her colleagues. We don't know what breed Dad is—he was put in with our order to add to the number of warm bodies. You only need one rooster for about 20 hens, so roosters are kind of extra to a hatchery. I thought I had a picture of him, but I don't see one, so I'll have to go out and take one tomorrow. Then you can see what the proud Papa looks like.