Down At the Barn

Down at the barn, we visit our chicks.  Well, at least that’s what the kids say they want to do.

Really, it goes more like this:

Boys jump on the old snowmobiles in storage down there…a bit held together with duct tape.

Girl snuggles some baby birds.

Then joins her brothers for the ride.

Update in our chicks:
They’re looking much better, and growing like crazy.  One died early on, without reason.  That’s one thing I’ve learned: chicks just die and they rarely have a reason.  So there’s 9 in there now.  It was the chick the kids handled the most, which made me drill them all again on proper handling of chicks.  I wasn’t too hard on them because the chick was handled the most because she was the easiest to catch…very slow.  I can’t be sure she just wasn’t sick to begin with.

Last night Knut found one perched on top of something outside the empty water barrel they’re living in.  So they now are big enough for a cover, and the older kids are no longer allowed to go down there and visit them without me, because I’ll have to remove the partial fence for them that Knut laid over the top.

I have gotten a chance to observe these girls. (I hope they’re all girls…I have my suspicions that a few are roosters).  They’re behaving really well.  I’m wondering what they’re going to do when they soon outgrow our makeshift brooder right now.  Knut and I agreed they weren’t ready to meet our hens yet.  My guess is in another month or so.  Only one now has bare splotches on the neck, and even that is getting much less severe.  Still, they’re little.

My current plan is to let them get as big as we can manage in the barn, then transfer them all to the coop in the evening when all the other hens are in there.  Then we’ll lock them all in there together for about 3 days, and let them sort out some housekeeping.  (Well have to check on them, of course.)  When we had the other hens, we put them in there for a few days without roaming just for the sake of ingraining in their minds that this was their home, and they were to return there to roost.  It worked, so I suppose we’ll have to do that with the new girls, and the old girls will just have to go along with it.