Baby Chicks, bringing them home

This post is part of a series, please start here

Oh the novelty of baby animals.

With eight people in the family we have a rather large kitchen table.  It’s a conference table that we bought second had to contain all of our people at meal time.  Much to my chagrin, those people keep getting bigger and delight in their new-found independence and outside activities, and most of the time we aren’t all home for dinner.  Since we don’t often use the whole table, the extra space is taken up by whatever project is out at the moment.

Guess what the  project is now?  Yep, chickens.  Remember I mentioned that we brought the baby chicks home in a bin and these 4 cuties were in that clear bin sitting on the table and turned out to be quite the attraction.  We could have charged admission to all the neighbor kids who paraded past to see the hub bub. (Maybe we should have, keep that in mind for later on in the story)

Each of the 3 youngest children claimed and then named their  baby chicks.  We have Ebony, Jasmine and Ginger.  That left the tall lanky bird for me to claim.  It wasn’t the cutest bird but I’ve read the story of the ugly duckling so I had hope for her.  I named her Honey after the color of her feathers.

They cheeped and peeped and  happily huddled under their heat lamp most of the day.  Each week we gradually moved the light farther away so they could adapt to the lower temps, this took them down about 5 degrees each week.

As these baby chicks grew, the novelty wore off and the bin began to get too small for their comfort, not to mention they were a bit too tempting for the  cats so we located a bigger bin and moved them to a bedroom where we could close the door (and keep the curious cats out)  This lasted a week or two.  Pretty soon the ‘farm animal’ um…scent prompted the decision to relocate them again to the garage.

It was time to face facts.  These baby chicks were not getting any smaller (they are chickens after all) and pretty soon they’d need a more permanent home so the hunt was on…

Have you ever been on a coop hunt?   Is that like hunting snipes?  Possibly, stay tuned.

Here are a couple of absolutely horrible photos just so you can get an idea.

This is Honey, the tall lanky one. The one only a mother could love.

They were in constant motion so catching a photo of all of them was so tough, this is as good as it gets.

Top view of (L-R) Honey, Ginger, Jasmine while they are eating.

Here’s Jasmine looking at you and Ebony wearing the black.