We had Rosie's BFF neighbor dog Beanie overnight, and in the morning we had pancakes. So beanie got to take part in our weekly ritual. She was pretty good at it, but it's definitely much more work to get three dogs to cooperate for photos than it is one or two.
This is the look Rosie gives me when I call her name while she's in the middle of stomping on some plant.
I've been really down since realizing on Monday that the kitty was in a downward spiral and we needed to make that vet appointment. So instead of being all sad and weepy here, here are some pictures of the chicks enjoying a little outside time and stuff.
Here we have them in the first few days, playing with a piece of the shipping crate they came in. I used it to test whether they were ready to have wood chips down as bedding (which you have to be careful about, since they might eat them to the point of illness).
Then we went outside.
I think we will be keeping this chick, and I am provisionally calling her Dolly (for Dolly Parton).
We tried some experiments with the dog and chicks (apparently it's very hard to focus a camera with one hand while trying to make sure the chick doesn't fall off the dog's head). This chick is the Silver-Laced Wyandotte, and we will be calling her Janis (for Janis Joplin, because she spent her first few days stumbling around the habitat and falling over her feet).
I've given pet names to the two Barred Rocks who will go to the neighbors. They are Spot and Dot. This is Spot, who has a big white spot on her head.
Here's Rosie admiring the little chicky butts.
This is one of the easter-eggers, which the neighbor's kid calls Stripes. I think this will also be our chick, and I'm not sure what her name will be.
The little outdoor excursions are to give them something to think about that is new and interesting. They had a pretty good time easting weed seeds.
I'm pretty sure that this chick will be going to the neighbors. The neighbor-kid calls her Cornpuff and seems to love her best. She really liked sheltering under Rosie; I think the chicks have decided the dogs are their mommies.
We tried out putting Dolly on Rosie's back to see how she would do:
Given that the chicks hardly ever sit still even without being on fur, she did a decent job of holding still, and Rosie did even better.
This is how I took the chicks out for their first exercise hour: a big canning pot. Lots of jokes about chickens in the stewpot.
Here they are in their habitat with fancy wood chip bedding and their feeder and waterer up on bricks for their convenience.
Another exercise hour, Dot poking around in the dirt:
And Dolly growing out some butt feathers:
You can really see Dot's smaller head dot (smaller than Spot's, of course) here:
I thought the canning pot might be uncomfortable, so we tried out the shipping box they came in for the next visit outside:
Clockwise from top left: Janis (Silver-Laced Wyandotte), unnamed easter-egger, Dot (Barred Rock), Dolly (easter-egger), Spot (Barred Rock), Cornpuff (easter-egger).
So there's really only one name we need to come up with, and in part that has to wait until we're sure which easter-egger is going to the neighbors.
Noel went to the hardware store, and left the poor, abandoned dogs behind.
Rosie had a friend over to play today, and she got so worked up that she had to take a swim to cool down.
Then an after-swim roll in the straw I'm using to mulch the new garden plot.
Several people have asked how the dogs and chickens are getting along, and the news is very very good.
A few weeks ago, Goldie had a bout of Kennel Cough, which is basically a dog chest infection. She was very under the weather and spent one afternoon outside with me in the garden, while the chickens were out and about. They all did very well together, and after that, dogs and chickens seemed to reach a certain detente. In part because the dogs realized that chickens produce chicken poop out of their butts, and chicken poop is much better than feathers.
So we get a lot of this:
OK, it's gross. But it's also much less worrying than the dog lunging at the chickens as if to kill them all the time.
Also, the chickens are larger and more able to defend themselves (including the occasional peck on the nose), so the dogs are less inclined to get too close to the pointy end of things.
It works very well, indeed. Especially on Rosie's extra-thick coat.
During Chicken Exercise Hour today, I slung the aviary netting over the Chicken Yard. That means I can leave the girls back there for an afternoon without worrying about predation too much (a determined predator would be able to get through the net, but they would probably get terribly tangled in it in the process).
Everybody is looking very chickenesque these days. You can see here that Debbie's getting her belly feathers in still, but most of the rest is all feathery. She's about five weeks old now. I love the little earmuffs.
With a few visits to the yard under their feathers, the girls are much more exploratory than they had been. Today they dust-bathed in a different spot (one of the piles of soil from the fence post digging), and explored around the larger compost bin.
The bin is made from three pallets lashed together with brass wire, and it has a certain population of insect life thanks to about two years of service. This was of great interest to the girls.
For reasons I don't totally understand, they seem to all fixate on one area and try to get right there, rather than spreading themselves along the length of the bin. Maybe they think there's something special there. Maybe they're right.
It was mostly Debbie, though. I think those little white dots are bug eggs, and she was eating them.
Eventually Carole figured out that she could jump up and reach higher.
And then Joan joined her.
They're still getting the hang of perching -- check out Joan's death-grip on the slat she's standing on there -- but they're mostly good at it. Occasionally they will try to stand somewhere and just fall over, at which point they flap their wings and try to pretend they intended to fly down anyway.
A recent addition to the equipment is a lid for the transport box so the girls will not fly out halfway across the yard. This meant that the dogs could come over and look, which Rosie was very interested in doing.
And finally, I added a bunch more movies, of which this is one:
Let's hope our dog trainer doesn't see this and know how lax we've gotten.
On Monday evening, Rosie had an adverse reaction to a vaccination* and had to get emergency steroids, antihistamines, and fluids. She spent the night at the emergency vet before they cleared her to come home. And she's still kind of groggy and out of it, but much much better.
She does this just to keep us on our toes, I think.
*Leptospirosis; the evidence seems to indicate that vaccination is not going to be much help anyway, so neither of them will be getting this one again.
