Feathered Friends

Four weeks ago we added a few new members to the household: three barred Plymouth Rock chicks.

They were about three and a half weeks old when we got them and one of them could easily fit in one hand. These days it takes both hands to hold on to one of them safely. You can sort of see the difference in pictures #1 and #4 above. They've also gotten a fair bit faster too, which means it's now a challenge to catch them. Charity seems to find it amusing to watch me run around after them.

Last weekend we finally got a coop for them. It'll be another three to four months before they start laying eggs, but we'll be prepared when they do.

Charity had been hemming and hawing over the decision, but it looks like she's made the right choice. The coop looks great, works well, and best of all, does not involve me building one!

Unfortunately, neither the coop nor their speed helped them this weekend. We came home on Saturday to find the coop open and no chicks in sight. A frantic search revealed a half-eaten body of one of the chicks. It took much longer to find the remaining two, safely hidden away in a corner under a bunch of chicken wire. If I hadn't heard them cheeping when I walked by I would never have found them.

While we can't be sure how they got out of the coop, we suspect that an unnamed toddler had been playing with the latch and left it unlocked, allowing the chickens to knock the door open and get out. It's easy to point the finger at him though. He can't really defend himself. It may have been something else entirely.

We do, however, know what happened to the chick.

Through sheer coincidence, someone had came by the house while we were out to pick up our extra chicken wire and managed to take a picture of the red hawk in the middle of our back yard. The bench just barely blocks out its meal.

Charity feels horrible that we failed to protect the chick, and Andrew's been asking "where's the other chicken". He doesn't quite understand the concept of "dead" and if something's gone it must have gone somewhere, right?

As for myself, I'm more annoyed than anything else. A Plymouth Rock lays 200-300 eggs a year, and that hawk cost us a lot of eggs. I guess we won't be letting the chickens free range unsupervised in the future.