That’s Floppy Chicken.  Pretending to be a hawk.  Or perhaps a cockatiel.  She’s flying from one rafter to the other in the big barn.  Chickens are really pretty good at flying when they want to be.

I always get a kick out of the hens all sitting up high in the rafters.  They are sure safe up there.  About half of the free range flock roosts up on the various rafters at night.  The rest hang out on the old ladder or in the feed room.  I would prefer they don’t roost in the feed room, but it’s rather hard to stop them.  It’s okay.  Most of them are in the barn.

Bucka Roo taking his favorite peeps on a field trip.  Every so often during the day, he rounds up at least four or five of the girls with a sweet little chicken call and off they go, walking around the farm on these random field trips.  Some days they go out front, other days out to the wood lot.  Or to the garden.  Sometimes up to the courtyard.  It’s like he just has a rambling spirit, but he hates to be alone.  It’s funny to watch them all waddle along after him, a roo with a mission.

We just love our chickens here at the farm.  I would miss the sheep and Cody terriably, if we could not keep them but to loose the chickens too?  I just couldn’t stand it.  They are so much of our lives!  I just adore them all.

Like when I go out to the little coop and Pierre is waiting for me!  He sees me coming and runs to the fence and calls to me.  If I don’t pick him up and cuddle with him, he will get ticked and follow me around, pecking at my pants!

I love Flipper, the splash Marans roo in the poultry barn… he’s learning to crow and it sounds like he’s strangling one of the cats!  He tries so hard!

And the little meat nuggets, heck I like them too.  I love how they are enjoying the chicken tractor.  We move it every two days and when we do, it’s so funny to watch them slowly move along with the cage moving… and then their frenzy when they hit all the new grass and weeds!  They start snatching it up and scratching for bug and pretty much are very excited.  They are doing an excellent job of eating down some serious mean weeds in our garden!  And fertilizing as they go!

And I love getting eggs in the afternoon.  I buy up pretty baskets at the Goodwill or garage sales for 50 cents or less.  And we have several in each of the egg laying spots.  So we always have pretty baskets to fill up with the gorgeous eggs that our hens lay!  Browns and blues and beige and deep chocolate brown…  speckled sometimes too!  They are stunning and they look so pretty in the baskets!  The girls are finally hitting their stride, we have 14 dozen in the frig already to be sold!  Every time I see a basket full, I just want to take a picture, even after a year, I still find them dazzling to behold.

The turkeys are doing great!   Growing up nicely… 9 days old today!  So far, so good!

Oh, and we found an old but nice cooler on the side of the road… West Unity is having their big item pickup day tomorrow and they encourage folks to curb side pick…  like a free garage sale!  So we went and found some neat things… a nice little table/desk to put in our foyer, two boxes of kids books for this cool idea we have…  a pair of nice shuttered bi-fold doors  all wood!  And the cooler.  We are going to build an incubator out of it.  We have given up on the styrofoam one, the last two hatches were not good and we have read that the styrofoam ones start to fail after a few hatches…  something about they are super hard to keep clean and the styrofoam absorbs stuff….  I just don’t want to risk any more poor hatches.  So we are going to build one like our first one and see how it goes.  I’ve been getting lots of beautiful beautiful Marans eggs from my ladies…  just gotta try hatching some soon!

Well…  today was just a lovely day…  got lots done today for sure!  Hope you’re having a lovely spring in your neck of the woods!