Chicky Ladies

On Wednesday night we put the chicks in with the chickens. All eighteen are now free to roam. Roam about their pen, that is. We don't technically have free range hens. They are all in a fairly large area that includes a horse stall to be locked up safely in at night and to come and go into as they please throughout the day. They share an outside enclosure with the goats during daylight hours that is made up of two horse stalls, one of which is twice as large as the other. This works well other than the fact that we are trying to figure out how to feed the chickens during the day without the goats getting into it. Incorporating the chicks into the already established flock of hens worked fairly smooth since we did it at night when the birds want to be roosting. The older hens were taken unaware. The chicks were a bit more riled up when they were put into their new home because we had to clip their wings first. All this consists of is trimming the long feathers on their wings so that they can't fly. Not that chickens can really fly, but they can flap hard enough to get over the fence and then you have chickens on the loose. Which isn't fun. Catching chickens is quite an adventure. The ladies are all doing well and I look forward to the day when we get more than a dozen eggs a day. Until then, I am satisfied with the three to five eggs a day they gift to us.