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Archive for March 16th, 2021

Diary #559

Posted in Diary, tagged , on March 16, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I’ve never seen chicks grow and develop as quickly as this batch. In only two weeks they’ve not only grown quite large and filled out with a generous display of feathers, but also developed strong enough wings to flit about their enclosure; just a little before snapping this picture one actually flew to the top of the little wall.  When cleaning their litter on Saturday I doubled the size of the enclosure, and it’s in the bathroom with the door kept closed, so even if one escapes she won’t get far.  On Sunday I’ll be moving them out into the henhouse; I’ve got a chicken-wire enclosure there to protect them from the adult hens until they’re a bit bigger, and they’ll spend three weeks confined in there before I open it to let them move in and out.  Meanwhile, I’ve culled three of the currently-adult hens who are poor layers; it’s not worth the trouble to kill and prepare them for the small amount of tough meat they carry, so I just took them down the road and let them go in front of a farm which has a very large free-ranging flock (Jae refers to this as “chicken trafficking”).  To make the process easier, I plan to alternate colors so in any given year, I can easily tell which are the old ones who need to be rotated out.  Yes, I have a system for just about everything; it’s part of the charm of OCD.

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