growing up

One thing to be said about chicks is they grow up overnight. One day they're fluffy babies that fit in the palm of your hand; the next they're bigger than pigeons and they still sit in the palm of your hand, but their feet fill your entire palm. Chicken feet are strange and wonderful. Their toenails are long and sharp, their skin dry and scaley--and they're WARM. At about eight weeks, they have started to sound like real chickens. They're like teenagers whose voices are changing. Sometimes they say "peep" and sometimes it's "bawk!". They've started to look like real chickens. They peck constantly and LOVE cottage cheese and kale. The other day it was 80 degrees outside, so we took them outside for the first time. They tentatively walked around the yard, pecking and scratching and gobbled up some earthworms. Speaking of earth worms, I was recently reading in a magazine that the earthworm enzymes are able to render PCB's in soil non-toxic. Once again, earthworms save the world. Back to the chickens. Every time they got scared, they would run back to us and jump on our laps. I would say that we are officially part of their flock. Can't wait for them to be old enough to be outside all the time. They seem to love it. And our office is getting pretty stinky...

first night

Things were complicated considerably when we got the chicks home. Suddenly they needed a box to live in outfitted with the heat lamp, feeder and waterer. We set their box up in the kitchen, but found that we didn't have anywhere to hang the heat lamp. So Eric stood, holding the heat lamp, fretting that the chicks were going to die. Every few minutes he'd say "Oh no, they're dying. I'm sure they're dying. This is horrible." Then, of course, the heat lamp broke. So I ran out to get them a new heat lamp. We decided that we couldn't keep them in the kitchen, since the kittens kept jumping on top of the chicken wire covering the box, and also because it was just downright impractical...

After we got them set up with water and food in the office (where the door could be closed) and had fretted for nearly two hours trying to get their heat lamp adjusted to where the temperature was in the 90's, we left them alone. Not for long, though... Every hour or so, Eric woke up and said "Are the chickens dead? They're dead aren't they? Oh god, this was a mistake... We don't know what we're doing!" Needless to say, they made it through their first night...

city chicks

We recently adopted two baby chicks from the Monroe Feed Store in Monroe, WA. Picking out chicks is an agonizing task. How do you pick just two? They're all equally cute and all equally deserving of a happy home. Furthermore, by picking those particular two you may be dooming the others to a short unhappy life that ends with roasted chicken on somebody's dinner table. These chickens were to be coddled pets, raised in the backyard in the middle of Seattle and fed the most delicious chicken-friendly delicacies (more on this to come). After finally selecting one Buff Orpington (having heard this was "the friendliest breed of bird you'll ever meet") and one Barred Plymouth Rock, we closed them up in a little cardboard box and loaded down with chicken supplies (chicken starter food, waterer, feeder, heat lamp & bulb) we scurried out to the car and blasted the heat on the box to keep them warm all the way back to Seattle...