New Chicks Outside

Since we were debating on letting the little ones loose with the big ones, we decided to test out how well they interacted during the day under our supervision. The verdict was a definitely another week… at least… in the cage.

While the big girls were out wreaking havoc on everything their little scratching feet and plucking beaks could reach, we opened the cage inside the henhouse with Kendra and the three baby chicks to let them roam the run. Quickly we decided to go ahead and open the run door so they could go explore outside too if they wanted to. This of course meant that it was a free invitation to the other girls to meet the little ones, which my first thought was a fear that Dawn, our head “rooster” (aka, hen with a dominatrix gene that activated with the absence of a real rooster) would attack them, but she seemed either uninterested or had already accepted them into the flock, much like our head hen, Buffy.

Anya, on the other hand, our Black Sex Link, didn’t particularly care for the babies and quickly started pecking them and attacking Kendra. Oddly, Anya is pretty sweet, albeit curious, towards us, but she is above Kendra in the pecking order and Kendra’s chicks would be below her and she was definitely making that point. Intervening only slightly, we moved Anya by throwing down scratch in another area of the yard and all the other hens ran over to gobble it all up.

With a few moments of peace, Kendra quickly showed her little ones, Harmony, White Witch Willow and Joyce, where the water was, where the food was, where the grit is and how to scratch for the bits that fall out of the holder, and how to take a dust bath, which is one of her favorite things. Eventually they all made it outside to wander the yard but I failed to get any good pictures of that, save one where they are all just outside the door to the coop.

The rest of the chickens left Mama and Babies alone, that is, until it was time to put them away. Vamp Willow and Darth Rosenberg both put up a fight with Kendra as if telling her she wasn’t allowed back in. That was pretty much enough for us to realize it was too soon to let them all out of the cage inside the henhouse, so we managed to get Kendra and the babies into the coop first, closed the door, and scooped them up one-by-one and put them back into their tiny one room chicken condo for at least another week. Hopefully by then the little ones will have grown enough to fly out of the way and reach the roosts in the henhouse.