Chicks!

So much for selling off some chickens to lower the feed bill...



One of our hens had escaped the chicken coop months ago. We caught her and returned her to the coop, only to find her escaped again. We decided to leave her alone.

Thursday morning the girls came running in the from the barn shouting that there were chicks on the roof of the coop. I thought they were talking about the four month old chicks that we had recently put out in the coop. I groaned, thinking of the time it would take to get them down and back in the coop, and asked, "How did they get out?" Rachel looked at me funny and said, "From their shells!" Samantha then told me they were little chicks.

Out in the barn we have a tarp over the top of the nesting boxes in the coop. The hen had laid her eggs up there and two had hatched out. I had to go to work, so I left Abby in charge of figuring out how to get them down. They called me throughout the day to give me updates on how many had hatched. In total we had nine chicks hatch out of the fifteen eggs that had been laid.

Mama Hen is doing a great job of caring for them. It will interesting to see how many hens and how many roosters we end up with...