Peaceful vacation

Well we loaded up the girls in the car and drove up to the Berkshires. The drive was relaxing and comfortable.


Ha ha. Actually Lindsay is nicely showing you how roomy the new brooder cage is for the little ones. Our friend Courtenay loaned us her dog's cage and it is great. I was getting sick of having no real solid floor on the bottom of the first cage. I had to lay down a towel and then put paper towels on top of it. The girls learned how to scratch the ground a week ago, so the paper towels went everywhere, and subsequently their poop went everywhere as well. This new cage has a solid bottom so I can lay down pine shavings. Chickens get sick with cedar shavings, so they should never be used. I put cardboard around the bottom of the cage to keep the pine shavings from being kicked out of the cage. It's working perfectly. Plus the chicks have gotten so huge! Their heads are about the size their entire bodies were when they first arrived.

The first day we were here, Lindsay and I went out to hunt for good perching sticks. We put in two perches and already the girls have discovered them and love hanging out on them. They sleep on them at night, which is something adult chickens do.



This picture just makes my teeth hurt it's so cute. They look like owls or some other kind of wild bird to me. Andie's hairdo is getting funny. Her feathers are really coming in and standing straight up on her head. She has a kind of ratty mohwak. At the end of their second week, they have gotten feathers on their chest and around their necks. They still have fluff down their midlines (heads, backs, tushes, and lower bellies)

They LOVE grapes and make us laugh hysterically as they run around their cage cheeping like lunatics and trying to keep their prized grape pieces away from the others. They are so frantic that they don't realize that all of them have grape pieces. So that means that 3 chicks are running around the cage like pinballs trying to avoid the others. Lindsay was practically crying, she was laughing so hard.

Of course we let them go outside and taste all of the delicious Berkshire grass. We have to keep a close watch on them because the yard is big and there are usually hawks flying overhead. I think they are enjoying their vacation as much as we are.