cluck: the chicken update

One of my dearest friends for practically my entire life is here for the weekend.  We had a great time visiting after they arrived last night.  Today they are on a guided fishing trip.  Then tomorrow we are all going fishing.  I've lived in Montana for twenty years, and I don't think I've ever tried fly fishing.  It just never occurred to me.  So I will let you know how it goes.  It should be a nice day for a float, even if no fish are caught.

Jazz has been very sick.  I took her to the vet on Tuesday, and after a jaw-dropping amount of money spent on tests and x-rays, and then three different kinds of antibiotics, she is happy again. We are so relieved.  It made me realize that this must have been coming on for at least a week or two, because she hasn't been this sprightly in awhile. I tried to take a picture of her to show you how happy she is now, but every time I point the camera at her, she slinks away, so the pictures turn out looking like she is still sick.   

The chicken update:

All six of them! In one picture!

I'm getting more adventurous with the kinds of food I give them.  According to all my sources (which amount to a couple of books and some online reading), their main diet should be feed that is specifically formulated for laying chickens.  But (say the sources) they will also eat just about any kind of food that you care to give them. They are a living compost pile.

Our chickens must be picky eaters, though, because it hasn't quite worked with them.  They love any kind of bread (heels, hot dog buns, pizza crust), and strawberries, potato peels, tomatoes, and kale.  They have turned up their noses-- wait, beaks? do chickens have noses?-- at broccoli, bell peppers, cooked potatoes, onions, and the huge, enormous patty pan squashes that we find hidden under the leaves in our garden.  I was really bummed about that, because I sure don't want to eat those ones, and I thought giving them to the chickens would be the perfect solution. 

But their true love is scratch.  Oh, my do they love it.  Their regular food looks like large-grained sand.  They eat it, but they don't love it.

Their regular food

Scratch, on the other hand, looks sort of like cracked corn and bird seed mixed together, and it causes them to break into rapturous excitement.  It's not balanced nutritionally, so they're not supposed to have all that much.  It's like a treat. 
 

Scratch, aka crack for chickens

I usually give them about a cup of scratch a day, and since there are six of them eating it, it's not all that much per chicken.  I have a big yellow plastic cup that I use to scoop it out of the bag, and when I start shaking the cup, they come running.  They look hilarious when they run.  It is one of my favorite moments of the day.

 Since I scaled the resolution way back you may not be able to see this, but that last picture is mostly in focus except their heads are blurry-- that's how fast they go after that scratch.  The lumps of stuff are leftover crockpot oatmeal (since we have company, I actually made breakfast!), which is apparently way less appealing to them than the scratch.

Another thing I've learned is that they don't mind dirt.  That probably seems obvious, since chickens are famous for scratching around in the dirt, but it didn't really occur to me that they wouldn't mind if their food was dirty.  The first time I brought them scraps, I put them in a big old metal pan that the previous owners had left in the shed, but that was a no go.  So then I dumped it all out on the ground and they ate it. They just peck away at it, getting it all kinds of dirty, and it doesn't seem to bother them a bit.

We're still getting 4-6 eggs a day, but apparently that will drop off as the weather gets colder (and since we already had a record-breaking early hard freeze this week, that may be soon).  Honest to pete, when we were thinking about getting chickens, I just thought it would be fun to have chickens.  Like a feathered kind of pet.  It never really occurred to me that we would get so many EGGS.  Last week I handed out three dozen to friends, and I still have a dozen and a half in my refrigerator.  Be glad you don't live nearby or I'd show up on your doorstep.