Posturing

We did a little bit of the chicken shuffle last night.  We moved our five month olds, two hens & two roosters (yes we're keeping the roosters now, long story) into the enclosed yard/barn area with the adults.  Then we moved the six three month olds out to the chicken tractor.  Whew, feathers were flying!

Gotta say, I love watching these crazy birds.  The larger of the two roosters tried to come out and assert himself.  The response he received was a whipping by a particular Rhode Island hen.  He cowered and puffed up dancing in the corner, yet attracted no empathy from the others.  The Aruacana rooster made his way outside from inside the dark barn (we introduced them inside at dusk), and didn't have much better luck. 

I went out to check on them just before dark and all of the ladies had headed in to roost and two of the hens had perched themselves inside the barn, blocking the entrance from the outside.  Both roosters were stuck outside!  I guess we're going to see who rules the roost here!

Chicken Wrangling

This was the last weekend before we head to Kansas for Thanksgiving break.  Between that and seeing the first big snow storm of the season not too far from us, we really felt the pressure was on!  We had to tackle the most important of tasks...re-locating the hens to the barn.

Now, before you write this off as a breeze, this seemingly simple task is anything but.  First, B finished building a screen door to limit hen access to the area we had prepared.  I was truly amazed at how this hubby of mine can just head out to his shop and 30 minutes later have made a screen door, awesome!  Light and heat timers set, food and water ready, now just to get the birds. 

Since we are relocating where they roost, we needed to catch them.  This is loads of fun (note heavy sarcasm).  We put them one by one in a large tub with a cover and then as we add another hen to the tub, try not let the scared one(s) inside escape.  In the first batch we transported 4 in the tub and one sneaky devil managed to escape and headed, at amazing speed, for the sumac forest.   Grrr, after the hawk issue last week, I didn't want anyone running around in the open.  In the second batch we got 5, and one more made a break for it.  We transported the last 5 with little consequence. 

Now for the wrangling....there are two lovelies who have gone AWOL.  Now queue some banjo music....picture the four of us chasing, coaxing, herding, yelling, climbing in tall brush, running, jumping from side to side and waving arms wildly, until finally we wrangle the two into a space where we are surrounding them on all sides and slowly walking toward them. After this 20 minute chase, they walk quite contentedly into the chicken tractor.  Yes, it was great exercise and once we brought them to join the others, the rooster let us know, by the raise of his hackles, that our performance was unacceptable, but the new digs made up for it.