On Saturday, the weather helped me to accomplish with relative ease a task I thought was going to be rather difficult: putting the sapphire gems into the nursery in place of the pullets. I let the pullets out, and blocked the poultry door so the others couldn’t get in until I was ready. Then all I had to do was wait for one of the cloudbursts we had all day Saturday; I removed the block, let the hens come in from the rain, then re-blocked the entrance so they couldn’t get away. Five minutes later, it was done. The other adult hens seem uninterested in attacking the pullets, so I’m going to keep it this way for a week before letting the smallest of the sapphires out. If that goes well, I’ll let the second one out a week later, then the largest (who seems to be the main culprit) three weeks hence. If she behaves herself, well and fine; if not, she’s going down the road immediately because the few small brown eggs she lays aren’t worth her pecking the new pullets to death. You can see in this picture that the one with the worst wounds is now almost healed; her feathers are regrowing nicely, and by the time I let the bad egg out again (sorry about that) it should be difficut to tell which it was. So if I see more blood, I’ll know it’s a fresh attack and we’ll be back down to eight chickens until next spring.
Archive for May 10th, 2022
Diary #619
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, Sunset on May 10, 2022| Leave a Comment »
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