Babies are always fun!

Good day friends and fellow lovers of nature and it's ways! I hope today finds you doing well as you read this blog.

Starting a flock

Back in early March I made a little trip south to Worley, Idaho to pick up some young chickens from a small farm down there. I made a blog post about it, if you missed it you can see it here - A Brave Chicken Flew the Coop. As it turns out a couple of the chickens were a little older than I was told but that's fine, the other four were still right around 7 to 8 months. After having them for a couple of months one started Cock-A-Doodleing in the morning. First it sounded like he was sick but within a few days he apparently found his voice.

Mother nature rules the day

It doesn't take long to figure out what roosters and hens will do especially when their space is limited as it has been before my move to the new property. Recently as I've been transitioning to the new property one of my hens has become broody. The landowner there and I decided to just let nature take its course and see what happened. About a month later we have three chicks that survived and three that did not. We weren't really prepared for it and didn't know what to expect or do really so hopefully next time it happens the survival rate will be a little better.

New life

As for now we have three cute little chicks looking like they are all from different hens running around amongst the bigger chickens.

The puppy is confused - protect or chase?

Scout, the new pup seems to be figuring out that they are part of our pack and not dinner but his instinct when they fly away or run away is to chase. I'm trying to curtail that. If anyone has any advice in that area I would love to hear it.

I think nature's way is better

I don't know the sex of either of these three chicks yet and I guess I'll just have to wait to find out like I did with the rooster and the other hens I have. But I will say I'm pretty happy with the fact that there was no incubators used. They weren't taken from their mom, shot up with injections and shipped halfway across the country in a dark box with other chicks to a Tractor Supply store where I could then pick them up. That just seems completely inhumane. These cute little babies get to parade around with whichever one of them is their mama and the one that hatched them as if she is their mama. It's pretty cool to see nature in action.

New home for the birds

I've located a spot where I'm going to put the chicken coop over here and then cleared a pathway for me to easily get there from where I'm set up. I'm going to leave the area on the other side of the pathway as it is knowing the chickens will pretty well tear it up within a few weeks. I'm still trying to decide if I want to let them go completely free range or just give them a much bigger area inside of a fence. I'm always open to hearing your thoughts.

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