Spring Chickens!

Lily feeding the chicks when we brought them home

Here are the chicks in their new home in the garage!

It's so much fun to get baby chicks.  We are down to two old hens who don't lay anymore, so we thought it was time for some new ones.  The first time we got chicks, we got all the same kind.  This time, we were a little more adventurous.  We have six babies - the two with the brown feathers are Golden Comets, the same breed we had last time.  The white ones with the orange legs and beaks are Tetra Tints, which I hadn't heard of until we saw them at Tractor Supply, but they're supposed to be white chickens and lay cream-colored eggs.  The ones with the black feet are Rory's pick - they are Silkies.  I can't wait to watch them grow up!  They are small chickens, and lay small eggs, so that should be interesting, but they have fuzzy feathers that look like fur all over the place!  The interesting thing about them is that their skin is black, like their feet and beaks, but these are apparently going to have white feathers.

I forgot how quickly they grow!  The first picture shows them in a galvanized tub in Rory's room.  Well, they soon grew out of that and into a larger plastic bin.  But then they figured out how to get out of there.  One of them even decided to sleep perched on the edge of the bin.  So we decided that it was time for them to move out to the garage.  They're still too little to go outside, but Rory was going to be sleeping with chickens in his bed soon if we didn't do something!  So they're in a wooden pen in the garage with two heat lamps.  It's going to be interesting to figure out how to introduce them to the two older birds, but I guess they will all just have to get along somehow!  We also didn't have a dog last time, as we got Honey about a year after we got the chickens.  So we're trying to convince her that they are feathery puppies.  So far, she's snuffed at them a bit but that's all.  She may make a good chicken dog yet!