Chicken wellies

[valeriebutterley]

Hello, any other orphans out there?
I say orphans because our Humum suddenly disappeared and has only just arrived back. She appears at the windows of her coop and opens a strange little pop hole and yells and waves like she is going to fly and join us.
Meanwhile two familiar but not very familiar beings try and see to our needs, not to our satisfaction, we are all a bit smug about the quality of our diet, not the same anymore, though they do try. They work hard to please us, but no greens, no going out into the garden, so we went on strike.
We all agreed to halve our egg production, no effect, and it is not good to try to hold eggs back.
Indi, our Cornish member said she would shout every time the tall one came, and make a racket, no effect, but at least he learned her name and rank from the younger members of his flock.
Curly, one of our Croad members with funny slightly frizzled feathers fell for him a bit and started to make serious eyes at him, frightened him at bit, Curly is a seriously big girl, and Curly in a rage would be a first for us and hilarious, so we all waited with beaks agog.
However now Humum is back, so we may see her soon sliding, as the others do, down the garden or about in our run.

Cheers, fellow chicks, from our Clucktalk.

 

[Marigold]

Well, we've got through the first week on our new planet. It's taken us a while to sort out the bedtime routine - we all know how and when to go up the ramp into the coop, but are not entirely sure what to do next. We've been trying various sleeping positions. We worked out that four on a perch and one on the floor underneath isn't a good idea for the one on the floor, for reasons that will be obvious if you've ever tried it. So then we all squashed up on the back perch, which was very cosy but we had to take it in turns to breathe as we only just fitted on. Strange to say, sometimes in the morning we woke up and found that two of us were on the other perch, with no idea how we got there, although the next night we still couldn't work out how to do this. So Rose decided to sleep in one of the bedrooms off to the side of the back perch. She woke up on the front perch next morning, and then we found that a great big plastic pot was sleeping in the bedroom so she couldn't get back in. The pot seems to vanish during the day but comes back at night. Very strange.
As I said in my first post, we were initially very impressed with the food here. Every day for the first week, the human appeared on the dot of 7.15 with a large bowl of lovely goodies, pellets, corn, sunflower seeds and mealworms, garnished with Flubenvet, and we had learned to dash to the bowl and get it all down ASAP. But today the system seems to have broken down - no sign of the human until mid-morning, and then she only brought a few mealworms for us to eat out of her hands. When these were gone, which didn't take long, she started cleaning poo out of the coop, (5 neat piles close to each other in a row under the back perch) so i went over and started pecking her sleeve to try to get her to produce more mealworms but it didn't work. The pellets are OK but get a bit boring, but today we also had a big green lump of new food to peck at, which was quite interesting but not as nice as the morning mash.
We are all settling down together and working out how to get on. Lily and Iris seek each other out most of the time as they are the shyest pair, and they do look quite striking, one all white and the other entirely black. Daisy and Rosie seem to get on all right, but once or twice Rose has tried pecking me quite hard when the treats arrive. Since I'm the only one whose comb is beginning to be a little bit pink, and also I'm bigger than her, I had to put her in her place. These Blacktails think they can run the place!
Violet.

 

[rick]

Good to hear your getting along well Violet. The green thing is an acquired taste but we can't get enough of it.
Odd at the moment as our human has disappeared and we seem to be on emergency rations here. Said something about going to the hamster dam but even we chickens know that beavers build dams not hamsters.
All the best
Aerial

 

[bigyetiman]

Glad you are getting yourself to the top of the pecking order Violet.
Hamster dam, I think that is thinly disguised for meaning holiday. Our human does this and tries to sweeten it by saying "it's only a week", well I can tell you not only is it a long time in politics, its even longer in our world, with no one at our beck and call and confined to barracks.
Our humum has been acting very weird today. Suddenly appeared with 3 extra legs at a strange angle, with a strange long object with glass at each end atop it. This was pointed at the sky, she then was looking earnestly upwards through binoculars, then pointing and telling the other human who was busy sawing wood, "kettle of 5 Buzzards at 2 O clock, Red Kite high north, now you would never fit 5 buzzards in a kettle, even we can work that out, and it was 10 30 at the time, this has gone on for a while, all very strange. Obviously the warm sun today has got to her. Not to mention getting excited about things that could potentially be putting us on the lunch menu, like the Peregrine
Humans, odd lot
Yours Misty

 

[Evie]

Violet, just to let you know not to worry, the white stuff outside all over the place is called snow and it’ll disappear again tomorrow. It’s cold and can be dry or wet, and sometimes the little humans roll it into big balls that they poke a twig iand call them snowmen. We hate the stuff, we don’t come outside when it’s there (we never asked for it!) but it melts away as soon as the temperature increases again. Ask your human for the met office weather forecast, and pretend to be listless so you get extra treats.

Makes good pictures, though! Sets off the colour of yuor feathers really nicely, and glistens in the sun.

 

[bigyetiman]

Great fun this am. Our human popped into the little outhouse where our "stuff" is stored put her feet in the wellies and found they were full of snow which had blown in. Hilarious, other than that we have not been out of the coop for a day. Looks like an indoor day today to. Mind you we have had a lovely warm breakfast two days running

 

[rick]

The chilly white stuff is back here again too. Our human has returned and we are working on looking neglected to get extra treats (had a fine time and layed lots of eggs actually but not letting on.) Mind you, last night the pipe for the hose thing came off, luckily after we had turned in to roost. Our run was turning into a paddling pool down below! Now we have wet auboise and will have to do with a quarter bag as a change until the other dries out. Chilly on the feet!

 

[Marigold]

Thanks for the advice, everyone. It was certainly a shock when we got up this morning. The water had gone completely solid, but the human did bring another drinker and some nice warm mash, so we all piled in like wolves. The garden outside was deep in white feathery stuff and although we have a roof on our run and willow screening round some of the sides, some of it had blown in through the mesh. It's a bit dark in here, somehow the roof has got covered up with white stuff.



Here's the garden - the human took this one from a pophole in her coop. We live in the far right-hand corner, our run is behind the tall evergreen tree.



Some of it had even blown in round the feeder but Rose found that the pellets were OK.



Anyway, I thought you'd all like to see how nicely my comb is coming on. Much pinker than Rose's!





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[bigyetiman]

You are all looking lovely and you have a lovely garden. Beware of the round thing in the middle, it's very nasty if you fall in, as Izzie found out once here. Quite funny really as being a Light Sussex, she looked very grubby for a change.
Mash is wonderful on a cold day, but on balance we could all do without the snow

 

[Marigold]

Violet here again. We've been living here for 3 weeks and are now 19 weeks old and have all grown quite a bit, though I'm still the biggest and heaviest. I'm really peed off, though, because our smallest girl, Lily Leghorn, has been the first to lay an egg - in fact, three, over the past 3 days. We're still all roosting crammed on to the back perch in the coop, and it's getting to be rather a squash - (I keep forgetting to explore the coop and see if there's any way we could use the other perch, the one we all have to clamber over to get to the one at the back, as it does look remarkably similar.) Anyway, last Wednesday morning, there we were, all squashed up and dozing, with little Lily in the middle, when she woke us up with a surprised little cluck and we saw she had squeezed out a little white egg on to the floor under the perch! During that day she explored further and has since started depositing it in one of the rooms at the side of the coop. For some unknown reason, the human has been making a big fuss of Lily and giving her extra mealworms. True, her comb is becoming a funny shape, hanging over her left eye in an affected way, getting much bigger and is now quite red, but so is mine, and all I get is 'Your turn next, Violet! Hurry up!' And her eggs are only 42 grams so far, so I really can't see what all the fuss is about. We've both been crouching and flattening ourselves when she strokes our backs, and none of the other three girls have worked out that this is good for another mealworm.
The human has been giving us various new foods and we've been suspicious of all of them at first, but curiosity has got the better of us in the end. We ignored the first half-cabbage she hung up on a string for two days, but once we found it was fun to peck it and dodge the swinging wrecking ball, we discovered it tasted rather nice. Since then, we've been getting through new offerings much faster. Sometimes we get little short bits of bright green grass, mixed up with corn, which we all love. She keeps promising to bring goose grass and garlic mustard when it's grown a bit, whatever that may be. So not too bad here, after all. Will let you know if I manage to be next to lay an egg.

 

[Marigold]

Got the human to take a selfie of me today. I've found that if I sit on the long perch when she's crouching down poo picking, I can walk up her arm and peck the shiny metallic sides of her spectacles.

She's in a tizzy today because SOMEBODY has laid an egg in the dustbath and she's not sure if it was laid by me or Iris. Of course WE know and are laughing under our wings about it, but I'm not saying who it was.


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[bigyetiman]

You look lovely and humans just love that sort of things, when you show interest in anything attached to their person.
Tomorrow someone needs to lay an egg somewhere else, just to add to the confusion. Can't see what difference it makes, after all they can bend down and pick it up just as easily where ever we choose to lay it

 

[Icemaiden]

Nadia & co, You really mustn't give this human ideas. He's had us modeling all sots of get ups all afternoon!

wellies.jpg

Mum tells us not to complain about the mud, as apparently a lot of hen runs are completely flooded at the moment, but we really could do with some waders. It's a good 3 foot walk from the bottom of our ramp to the door of our greenhouse and the whole run's a quagmire...

 

[bigyetiman]

It is like that here, we have been flooded once, luckily Izzie being 6 and two other oldies knew exactly what to do, including giving the human a look.
After continual rain for ever even our dry patch under the hedge is somewhat damp which makes dustbathing a damp experience, and the mud just squidges between our toes as we walk across the grass as for the run it was ghastly, but fresh straw is being provided and replaced.
I fancy a nice diamante pair of wellies myself, preferably Jimmy Chucks

 

[Icemaiden]

 

[bigyetiman]

Well, we have been looking through the forum and us girls quite enjoyed this thread, as it proved to us that all our humans are very good at talking about "The Weather" but have very limited capabilities when it comes to stopping a monsoon, hurricane, and the dreaded snow and frost.

They come down and grumble about being cold etc when they let us out into the elements, then as we try to avoid mud, rain, wind we can see them all warm and toasty looking at us through a pane of glass. Worse of all sometimes they are eating and drinking in the warm, whilst we have to chip ice off a muddy puddle, so much tastier than the clean warm stuff provided