Chooks

It's taken a while but finally we have chooks! It has been months in the planning, four weeks since we had the first big working bee on the chook house and three weeks since we finished building the main part of the structure. Finishing off the house and fitting it out over the last few weekends were much more fiddly and time consuming than we expected.

We found a guy on Gumtree selling chooks at Bridgewater which is about 20 minutes drive up the highway. (I really wanted to find some on ChookNet because I love the fact that this website exists, but there were no point-of-lay pullets being advertised there). Ken's chooks free-range, but he'd put some in a cage for us to choose from. They are around fifteen weeks old which means they will start laying in a month or so.

We bought three and brought them home in a big box - apparently turning up with a box made us more prepared than most of his customers. They didn't seem to mind the trip apart from the roundabouts. Then we put straw and wood shavings in the house and filled their food and water.

Then opened the box and they just sat there.

So we had to grab them and put them in the house by hand.

They seemed pretty comfortable straightaway and not stressed by their journey at all. Sofia was fascinated but not quite sure what to make of them. If only they understood what is coming their way once she gets used to them...

When we gave them some food scraps they got straight into it and were scratching around finding their own too.  

The run is a bit of a mud pit as we've had 30mm of rain in the past three days and it is clay soil. We may have to work on drainage, but once the chooks have settled in they will be able to roam more widely in the backyard during the day where there is grass and all manner of tasty plants and insects.