Have you been wondering about my chickens?

Chicken run...ready for the fall (chickens featured: Princess Snow White and Annabelle)

 I still adore my birds.  I'm crossing my fingers as I type this, but I've had some nice, relaxing months with my 5 remaining chickens...and though we had thought 6 birds would be the perfect number (and so started with 8 chicks, for any possible attrition)...5 is also wonderful.  It's a more manageable number, certainly.

Nice husband built a great outdoor pen for the chickens in later September, which we all really love.  It's great to have an outdoor spot for them to roam when I don't feel like watching them carefully and guarding against any marauding predators (though Hope takes care of that quite handily).  Alan Trammell is a huge wanderer, too...so even if I'm around the back yard I often lock them up just so that I don't have to go tromping through the woods to see where she has gone.

The pen is is situated on the west side of their coop, enclosed in chicken wire (top too), and it gives them space to walk under their coop as well.  Their coop is on the south wall of our garage, under some pine trees, so it is pretty protected from the elements.  You can see from the picture that needles from the pine tree have fallen on top of the chicken wire covering the top of the pen - so great as it's becoming like a little natural roof.  Between the location next to the garage, the pine trees overhead, and the natural roof, they can be in their outdoor pen even when it is raining and they don't get wet!

This fall I loaded a whole bunch of fallen chopped leaves into their pen and under their coop, in hopes of insulating it for the cold days of winter.  They ADORE the giant leaf pile and love scratching around and fluffing it up.  Occasionally if they have been out for awhile I might find a chicken all cozied up in a little nest she's tossed up for herself.  It's totally cute how curious the chickens are...and how just a little something new in their pen, or in their coop, has them cocking their heads and pushing each other out of the way to explore.

We're getting nearly an egg per chicken per day...possibly 5 eggs a day (sometimes they bury them and I don't always find them until a day or two later so it's hard to keep perfect track).  They generally have their own location for laying their eggs...and I even saw Princess Snow White lay an egg once (she lays them out in the open...the others like to go in the laying boxes Bill made for them).  I love having fresh eggs from my happy, happy, healthy chickens...it feels good to know the animals that are producing some part of my diet are so well cared for.

Even more than that, though...I just love the chickens.  LONG after their laying days are over, I'm sure I'll still love them, thank them for their compost-making abilities (chicken poop makes compost so much quicker than any other ingredient I've ever tried), and enjoy watching them be their cute little selves.