Here chickie, chickie, chickie

We've got more chickens!!

Last Thursday we got some new baby chicks.  These are Americanas. 

 

They are very different from out other chickens, which are red pullets.  They are cute and fluffy, but they are more skittish, faster and pretty good jumpers.  I can't tell who is who.  I haven't learned their names, but they include Blackie and Joey (the two black ones), Cinnamon, Papalapa Ding Dong, Kirk, Jean-Luc, and Cleopatra. They were a random pick after they hatched and we don't know which ones are males and which are females.  We'll find that out as they get older.  We only want hens, though.

 

 

They like to sleep in their food and they jump on each other's heads.  I still just call them all nuggets.

 

Our other chickens are lovely red hens now.  They have not started laying eggs, yet.  Still waiting on them.  We've bought two grown chickens.  For a while they were both laying eggs, but now only one of them is.  The other one had a bit of excitement this week.  She got out of her pen and flew off over the fence.  We couldn't find her or catch her.  For two days we kept an eye out and set traps to get her back.  Finally our neighbor saw her.  It took three separate attempts with no less than five people each time, but our wayward chicken was finally recaptured and her wings promptly clipped. 

 

I go visit the chickens every day and usually take a treat for them.  They LOVE bread.  They also love macaroni and cheese and spaghetti noodles.  When I come up to the pen, they all run to the door and start hopping, excited for their treat.  I'm certainly enjoying our chickens.  I hope they all start laying eggs soon and I hope more of these baby chicks are hens rather than roosters.  We'll see.....

Growing Nuggets

Our chicken nuggets have grown a lot.  Each day they change and get bigger.  After the first week, they started to change.  They were quite ugly as their adult feathers started to sprout under their baby fuzz.  We joked at how they are going through the awkward teen stage.  They aren't quite so ugly anymore.  They still have some baby fuzz and sound like baby chicks, but they have many of their adult feathers. 

They are speedy fast and getting more difficult to catch.  We take them out of their bucket to clean out their stinky bucket each day.  If they day is sunny, we put them in the yard while we wash the tub.  They are happy chickies when we do this.  They are very unhappy when we catch them to put them back into their bucket.

Really, they are getting too big for their bucket, but we don't have anywhere else to put them yet.  We are hoping the weather will turn warm soon.  They keep pecking at their bucket, trying to escape.  We've also had to put a chicken wire lid on the bucket because they can hop out now.

We can't tell them apart anymore, not since they've gotten their real feathers.  I call each one Nugget.

A little time in the yard.

Really, they've changed a lot since this picture was taken 3 days ago.  It's amazing how fast they are growing.

Meet our nuggets

We've got ourselves six little chicken nuggets.  They have survived two days and two nights with us.  They are getting lots and lots of love.  They have been given names.

Oldest son named his Mary Elena
Second son named his Berk
Oldest daughter named hers Fluffette
Youngest son named his Frosty
Youngest daughter named hers Rosalinda
I picked the final name and it is Nugget

They are almost impossible to tell them apart, but Berk does have a different pattern on her back that makes her a little easier to distinguish.  My husband attempted to 'mark' the chicks by dyeing two of them.  Frosty has some blue in his wings and Rosalinda is pink.  You can kind of see them in the pictures.  I just call them all Nugget.

I was getting ready to clean out their stinky bucket when I took this picture.  They didn't like the box I had for them....

They live in a bucket in the bathtub and will live there until they are big enough to be outside. I've never dealt with chickens before, so I don't know how long that will take. Three weeks, maybe??  Until then, they are super cute and oh so fluffy!!!