Bringing Home the Chickens

The sun set in a rather spectacular fashion on Friday and then it was gone. I do mean gone as we haven't seen it since. It looks like we are finally getting winter as the weather has turned snowy and very cold. I doubt we will be getting any sun for days which means we will have to use the generator to charge the batteries. Oh well! At least it is mid January already, which means it can't last too long! Right?

But back to my chicken dilemma...
I finally determined to get some chickens the only problem was.
1. I wanted a heritage breed and could not find a hatchery that sold them.
2. It was now June and getting too warm out to have the wood stove going in the house, so even if I could find a hatchery, without heat the day old chicks would not survive.

The only thing to do was to find someone who was willing to part with a few of their birds. I started scouring the newspapers and internet but it seemed like a lost cause for a while. After all I didn't get to town very often and didn't have internet as yet. Finally I picked up a fairly local paper and found a number for a lady who was looking to sell a few of her heritage birds. The only thing was she really didn't know what kind they were. It seems while she used to have a few separate breeds they had been allowed to roam free and did what chickens naturally do when left alone. They reproduced, and apparently they didn't care that they were supposed to mate with other birds of like breed but rather they intermingled and created some rather unique breed perspectives.

I didn't care. Finally, I was going to get my chickens! So off I went with a couple large cardboard boxes in the back seat of my car. It took a bit of time to sort out which birds I was going to take and get them stuffed in the boxes. They were still a bit young and I wasn't sure how many roosters and hens I had but I was to happy it didn't matter. If there were too many roosters we would just have more chicken soup than expected.

I drove home listening to the peep, peep, peep coming from the boxes but other than that they were very well behaved.

Chickens! Finally I had chickens. They were still too young of course to lay eggs but I sure couldn't wait for that to start happening. I could have sat for hours watching them as they are such funny cute creatures.