Sunday, June 08, 2008

Chicken Run

Heathcliff lets the turkeys know he is the boss.


Nobody wants anything to do with these grouchy guys - good thing they have each other to hang with.














the solid black ones are black sexlinks like we raised in Joseph. The speckled ones are barred rocks.












Saturday was also the first day of yard time for the chickens and turkeys. Heathcliff, the goose, knows that he is responsible for the safety of all the smaller fowl and takes his duties very seriously. He keeps that big white bucket there next to their gate (he thinks the bucket is a fellow goose, but that's a little personal for a public blog, so we won't go into that)..... to appreciate this story, you just need to know that he has "sacred" areas - the white pole, the fire barrel, the bucket. Nobody is allowed to touch them.

He prefers the chicks to be inside their fenced area where he knows they are safe and he will often sleep outside their pen at night to be sure they are safe. But when they enter the yard, he has trouble letting them explore. So these pictures are of the yard and everybody trying to make their way in the world. In the videos he finally left his bucket and went over to defend his barrel and then some chicks got too close to the bucket and he had to go back over to defend it.

On a funny note that we didn't get recorded, the turkeys are pretty mean this year. Some of the chickens were in Gabby's yard and she was cool with that - the goats and the chickens get along really well. So when the turkeys wondered over to Gabby's fence she went over to meet them and one of the turkeys bit her ear and she pulled back in amazement and then leaned back to the turkey to see why he had done that and then the turkey took a nip at her nose. She didn't care for that at all. So far, the turkeys have bitten everybody, I think. They aren't even afraid of the goose (I'm afraid of the goose, for crying out loud). So I can pretty much guarantee that the turkeys will not make it thru the summer. Nobody likes to get nipped by a turkey.

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