Chicken Chat

What's in a name? That which we call a chicken....

So what do we call them? It depends on who you ask. Jenn has named one Liza Minnelli though I don't think she could tell you which one is Liza if you asked her. :) Avi calls them all "bawk bawk". I call them "Red One", "Yellow One", "Little One", and "Other One". I know they aren't the most creative names, but because I clean their shit, I think they will likely stick. Let me introduce you....

In the background is Other One and in the foreground is Little One. 

For the record, Little One is also known as Liza.  

Here is Yellow One.

And last but not least, Red One.

Credit where credit is due...

So all this time, I thought it was Red giving us our first eggs, but I discovered that it is actually Other One who is responsible!  She is laying one egg every to every other day. Avi loves to find the eggs in the nesting boxes (good girl, Other One, for laying there) and we are eating delicious healthy eggs at least every other day for breakfast.  Time to start looking up quiche recipes.

Here is Other One in front.  

Behind her Red, Yellow, and way in the back is Liza... er... Little One.

Sweet Freedom

So the girls have plenty of space in their run, but last week with the warmer weather and the snow melting, I decided to open the gate to their run and let them reek havoc on the yard.  Their run is still mostly snow/ice covered and I wanted them to be able to scratch. What a joy it was to watch these girls scratch about the yard, dig up the mulch, 'bathe' in it, and just enjoy this new found freedom. 

 Free at last.  

Notice the colorful bunting that Jenn's sister Melissa sent to decorate our coop. 

 My brood of five!

Scratch, dig, sit, bathe, repeat. 

The girls had fun, but then we ran into a problem...

 ...remember this post from a few weeks back? Well, we still have this box of styrofoam peanuts in the living room, but those that you see on the floor were scooped up and bagged to take to the UPS store for recycling. But the bag spilled in the garage a little and some of the peanuts from the garage floor got carried away by the gale force winds we had here and scattered around the neighborhood. Ugh, right.  Even more ugh when I find that chickens LOVE styrofoam. They love EATING it! After I found them pecking at it and actually eating it, I scooped up as many as I could find and then went inside to google "my chickens ate styrofoam" and found that my girls aren't alone. Most of what I found were worried chicken keepers being consoled by other more experienced chicken keepers who said their birds did the same and they survived. When I returned outside to check in on the girls, Other One was under the fence and into the neighbor's yard pecking even more styrofoam. Again, I picked up what I could find and then scooted the girls back into their run. And just a few days before I was saying how keeping chickens is way easier than keeping dogs. 

A little more fun before the styrofoam incident.

 I loved how they ruffled their feathers and rolled on their backs in the mulch.

Red, loving the freedom!