Checking in on the Chicks

We've had Oregano and Barbecue for a bit more than a week, and they are really growing!  I'll need to go get another bag of feed for them tomorrow.

 They preen often, and sometimes act like they itch!  When they preen themselves, sometimes down floats off of them and there will be a new feather visible.  It's pretty amazing.

They got to spend a good bit of the afternoon outdoors today.  The jury is still out on what breed they are and what color they will be when they get their adult feathers, but they seem to have brown earlobes so I am hoping they turn out to be brown egg layers.  (We can charge more for brown eggs.)

Speaking of selling eggs, we sell ours for $3.50 a dozen, $1.75 a half dozen, and 35 cents each.  That's more than the grocery store (but less than Wal-Mart, where 'jumbo' organic cage-free brown eggs are $4.22 a dozen, and they are not nearly as big as our eggs), but our eggs are huge.

We tried putting Oregano and Barbecue in the dog crate and putting that in the yard where Crockpot and Drumstick roam, but that didn't last very long. O and B are rather stupid and can't get the idea that if they put their tails up near the mesh of the dog crate, C and D will pick at their little tail feathers, and Crockpot even sticks her head into the crate and tries to peck them.  So we moved the crate to the outside of the picket fence, where they could still see each other but no chance of any touching, and the rest of the afternoon went well.  I'm hoping that we can do this regularly so that when it comes time to turn O and B into the yard, we won't have World War 3 in deciding the pecking order.

Here are the four of them this afternoon:

We have a piece of screen fabric on top of the box now, and Velvet had to secure it with some canned vegetables because they figured out how to jump up between the screen and the edge of the box, and escape.  Houdini chicks!

In other news, Birdman got a B on his first Biology test, and Lightning McQueen and Velvet each got an A on their math tests.  Birdman will have a Geometry test next week; the book is set up so there is a test after every 5 lessons once you get to lesson 10.