Who’s cuckoo

Yes, of course we got the five-day old chicks!  These little fluff balls currently live in the pantry in a box with a heat lamp and a locked door to keep the Damn Cat from snacking on chicken nuggets.  Pat calls them his babies and they are growing feathers by the day.  Watching 10 little chicks all try to eat out of the feed bowl at the same time is very funny.  They remind me of an unruly mob of very hungry toddlers at snack time.  If there is no room at the bowl, just jump on someone else’s head and make room.  They drink a lot of water and of course they poop everywhere.  This is not the first time I’ve dealt with chicken shit in my life, but it is the first time I’ve done it voluntarily.

There are 10 of them and their names are Lucile, Lionel and the back-ups.  Too young to know their sex and we only want one rooster, so there are some difficult poultry days ahead for me and some of them.  Three of them look similar, so with my long history of chicken raising (5 days now) I think we have 3 roosters, if I’m wrong….ut, oh!

Billie Elliot doesn’t read very well, but knew this bag meant something was up!   Truthfully this is day two, day one they were fed the horse’s grain.  Grinding up the horses grain was a little tough, until Pat figured out that our coffee grinder made a robust chicken meal.

Cuckoo Maran chickens are black with little white speckles and lay dark brown eggs, hopefully.  Currently the kittens are in the hen-house, which is still in transition from milk parlor to hen-house.  We are a little behind in the learning curve here as we forgot about the wind in the hen-house design.  (Blows like a son a of gun)  The chicken yard needs to be wind free, so the freshly planted posts are coming out to be reset, can you say, “Oh, well”.  Actually it is a little bit more amusing than that, as there was a cover for cattle that we took down attached to the milk parlor on the wind-free side.  We’re using most of that wood to build the chicken yard, so yes, we are rebuilding what we took down… but, it wasn’t really as nice (I say in my defense).  Thankfully we have only two neighbors, who are probably scratching their heads and wondering what in the world we are up to today!