Our Chickens Are Growing Up

So, as near as I can figure, the chicks were born on Monday, shipped on Tuesday and got to us on Wednesday, which means that as of Friday, they were four days old. And on Friday, they were already growing little tiny wing feathers. They looked kind of fake - all the same length and totally different than the fuzz on the rest of the bodies.

There are a few who are developing weird growth above their noses. I think it's the araucanas. Araucanas have longer feathers around their faces, and the one who's brown and puffy has started to look like a hamster with puffy cheeks and a brown fluffy body.

My next magical trick has been calling "chick, chick, chick" while holding out a handful of food and letting them come to me. As you can see, the Pirate was able to do this yesterday. I'm a little slower. But the snoring trick still works.

Today we framed three sides of the chicken house. Tomorrow we have to do the last side (the tall side), and then put the walls and roof on. We're nearly done with the coop, and it's a good thing, because they're going to outgrow the garage pretty soon at this rate.

I've been amazed that we haven't lost a single one yet. I'd figured that 20% (5 of them) would likely be lost before we realized any benefit from them (either in meat or eggs), but if we continue to exercise the caution and vigilance we've practiced thus far, I think we can keep all of them.

The last irony is that I was having lunch with my co-workers and they were uniformly aghast that I was going to kill and eat some of them. One of them said something like "haven't you heard of Safeway?" I don't like having to explain to people that it's not a terrible thing to like and enjoy the chicks, even while we plan to eat them later. I'm not gruesome or bad. People have been doing it for thousands of years, for crying out loud. So this morning I went down to the feed store to find out if I needed to add a vitamin supplement to my chicks' water, and we got to talking about the chickens. I told her what breeds we got and she was very enthusiastic, saying that they were great breeds - good layers. I told her about my plan to kill half of them at the first of the year, and she nodded her head and said "Oh, yeah. Barbecue. Good idea." Didn't even stop to think about it, like it was the most natural thing in the world. At the hardware store, when the Pirate and I were agonizing over hardware choices for connecting the framed wall to the floor joists, the guy walking by said "Oh, man, it took me $500 to build my chicken coop, and I was trying to be cheap." Everyone here has chickens, and they eat them and it's what people do.

It made me feel much better.