Chicken Update

Gina's great frog comment yesterday reminded me that she had also asked about our chicks earlier. So I guess it is time for a chick update.








When we first decided to get chicks we presumed that our old chickens would stop laying soon and therefore when the new chicks started laying it would be a case of "out with the old and in with the new". We also presumed that our chicken breeding skills wouldn't be quite up to it and that we would lose a couple of chicks in the process so ordered a couple of extra chicks just in case.
Theory is a great thing, but in practice... the ten old chickens are still laying pretty well (not one egg per chicken everyday, but at least 6 or 7 a day) and none of the baby chicks succumbed to disease, fright or heat exhaustion. So we now have a total of 22 chickens. The baby chicks are now almost as big in size as the older ones (you can tell them apart in the pictures by looking at their combs - the older ones have the bright red combs and the smaller ones have the smaller, pink combs) and eat almost as much. They are only 3 months old so it will be another couple of months before they actually start laying, but we have now combined them all into one chicken range and they seem to be living together in harmony - well the small chickens take over the big chicken's house during the day, the big chickens spend all day outside and lay their eggs in the little chicken's house, they all eat and drink from the same feeders - just at different times. or from different sides, at night the big chicken's go into their house, the little chickens go into their house and the whole cycle starts all over again in the morning! Confused? Basically all is going well in chicken land - and we are grateful that it is summer when the amount of food they eat goes down a lot!