The Honest Courtesan

Sunday was graduation day for the pullets.  On Saturday night I left the nursery open, and when I went into the henhouse on Sunday morning only one of them was still in there; after shooing her out I removed the chick feeder, water bottle, heat lamp and timer, so from now on they’ll come and go with the other chickens, on a natural daylight schedule.  It’ll probably be a few weeks before they start to follow the flock, and they’ll generally keep to their own clique until they start laying sometime in July.  I can’t yet tell whether the turkey is a tom or a hen, but she’s bolder than the others because despite being two weeks younger, she’s already noticeably larger.  But in any case, by September the hens will all be one flock (plus the turkey), and on the first day of autumn the timer-controlled heat lamp will go back on, and the cycle will begin again.