Fun with chickens

The chickens have turned out to be a lot of fun. Who knew? They're about 10 weeks old and they basically look like miniature chickens still and no longer little puff balls. We have 15 of them, and all but one are female. It turned out one is a cockerel (young rooster), whom we'd named Chicken Joe. So far he's nice and not aggressive, so we hope he stays that way. They were all supposed to be female, but we just figure we're lucky if only one is a rooster, considering how tricky sexing one-day-old chicks is. We intend to eat their eggs and not them. :-)

The birds actually have real personality, something I had never really expected. Here's a picture of their first day in the new coop, Ted's masterpiece. We had two old, "charming" (read: delapidated) chicken coops where Ted's family housed their chickens back in the day, but both buildings are so old and ramshackle from years of neglect that we figured it would be easier just to build from scratch.

I use the royal "we" of course since I was only a lackey, Home Depot fetcher, and now-and-again assistant. This was Ted's project and he worked long and hard on it. Every available free hour was spent on the thing for probably three months. Of course, it took more time and money than we anticipated, but the result is quite awesome, we think. It's got mesh in the floor and on the windows to keep out critters, as well as insulated walls. It also has perhaps the nicest windows of any chook house -- we used new Anderson double-paned windows from Michele's kitchen remodel 8 or 9 years ago that were unused because of a sizing mistake. They'd been sitting in the back chicken coop since then, gathering dust, so Ted built his plan around them. Now the birds have plenty of light and cross-breezes.

Ted also built a great roost for them to sleep at night. It's three levels of 2x4s, but all fifteen of them jockey for position every night on the top roost. It will be interesting to see how they manage and who gets booted to the lower levels once they're full-grown.




I'm so impressed by Ted's carpentry abilities. He really is a jack-of-all-trades! I've taken to calling him Dr. MacGyver!