A Weekend of Madcap Whimsy
It's taken us (and by "us" I mean the Pirate) two weekends to finish the new nesting boxes, but finished they are.
As you might recall, we'd gone through a period of egg eating. It had gotten bad enough that we were losing two or three a day for a few days, until I realized that we had 6 nesting boxes and now 13 hens sharing them. They were feeling a bit...crowded.
The Pirate initially relieved the stress by opening up the lower area so that some of the girls could lay on the floor, but that's never the best solution. On the other hand, the egg eating ceased immediately. But our flock kept growing, and we needed more space.
So we've gone from nine nexting boxes to a luxurious 15, each one with some lovely Astroturf (mostly because what we've got now is straw that the dumb chickens just keep kicking right out of the boxes). What remains to be seen is whether the ladies actually use the things. The first day that the Pirate put the new building in, we found at least two eggs on the floor, so confused were the chickens. Then again, they're completely taken in every time Clark Kent takes off his glasses, too.
On Saturday, I was dispatched from the Co-Prosperity Sphere at an unseemly hour to fetch a hundred pounds of chicken feed and a carpet steamer. Well, somewhere between the feed store and the carpet steamer, I managed to learn about and subsequently acquire four more chickens.
I don't know the gender of these, but it's likely that at least two of the four are girls. They're about two weeks old, which means that we don't need to brood them and they can spend time outside. We've put them into Cargill's old quarters so that, for the duration of their chickhood, they have both their own house and their own yard. When first set loose, they massed together in a little huddle, keening if they lost sight of each other.
By today, they're doing much better, walking about on their own, scratching for bugs and otherwise having a lovely time.
What they needed now was a name. Our first group of hens was named "Lucy" and the second "Myra." We've decided that this one is called "Alice." Time will tell if there is an "Alex" in the bunch.
As you might recall, we'd gone through a period of egg eating. It had gotten bad enough that we were losing two or three a day for a few days, until I realized that we had 6 nesting boxes and now 13 hens sharing them. They were feeling a bit...crowded.
The Pirate initially relieved the stress by opening up the lower area so that some of the girls could lay on the floor, but that's never the best solution. On the other hand, the egg eating ceased immediately. But our flock kept growing, and we needed more space.
So we've gone from nine nexting boxes to a luxurious 15, each one with some lovely Astroturf (mostly because what we've got now is straw that the dumb chickens just keep kicking right out of the boxes). What remains to be seen is whether the ladies actually use the things. The first day that the Pirate put the new building in, we found at least two eggs on the floor, so confused were the chickens. Then again, they're completely taken in every time Clark Kent takes off his glasses, too.
On Saturday, I was dispatched from the Co-Prosperity Sphere at an unseemly hour to fetch a hundred pounds of chicken feed and a carpet steamer. Well, somewhere between the feed store and the carpet steamer, I managed to learn about and subsequently acquire four more chickens.
I don't know the gender of these, but it's likely that at least two of the four are girls. They're about two weeks old, which means that we don't need to brood them and they can spend time outside. We've put them into Cargill's old quarters so that, for the duration of their chickhood, they have both their own house and their own yard. When first set loose, they massed together in a little huddle, keening if they lost sight of each other.
By today, they're doing much better, walking about on their own, scratching for bugs and otherwise having a lovely time.
What they needed now was a name. Our first group of hens was named "Lucy" and the second "Myra." We've decided that this one is called "Alice." Time will tell if there is an "Alex" in the bunch.
posted by Aoibheall | 9:38 PM
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