A Day in the Life of The Girls

It's been an interesting day for The Girls.  ("The Girls" being how I refer to our 6 young hens.)  Of course, they may not realize exactly how interesting the day has been - which is probably a good thing for them.

It started this morning when I went to open the hen house for the day.  The food container was tipped over  and the top portion that stores the food was separated from the dish part.  At first I didn't think much of it, but when I opened the door to the house, it hit the container.  Which meant that this had to have happened after The Girls went to bed last night.  Uh oh...

I mentioned it to The Man of the House and we went out to take a closer look.  Sure enough, something had dug under the enclosure to get to the food.  Not only had it managed to get into the run, but it had taken some work first.  This was no easy task for whatever-it-was.  There were at least 3 other places we could tell it had tried to dig under!  I guess we may have to start taking the food container into the garage when we put The Girls to bed at night.

When I went out to shovel up the spilled food, clean up their sandbox, and refill the food - I let The Girls out to play.  They love wandering in the underbrush at the edge of the wooded area, scratching and pecking.  Suddenly they were making quite a fuss of clucking and flapping of wings.  I look over, and there is The Princess's cat stalking them!!  They managed to do an admirable job staying away from him until I gathered him up and put him in the house.  He got a good scolding along the way.

After The girls had their chance to free roam a bit, fill up on weeds and bugs, and do whatever other chicken sort of things they do - it was time to go back in the run.  They did not agree.  I tried using corn to coax them back.  They would get close to the door of the run, then wander off.  I'm not fluent in chicken, but I feel pretty sure the basic idea was "Nope, I don't think so.  Not happening right now".

I was in no mood to argue.  So The Girls had a nice, long free roam session for a good part of the day before finally heading back into the chicken run not too long ago.  Finally.  Don't get me wrong... they didn't just wander in on their own free will.  There was some convincing that had to take place.  But they finally gave in.

Yep, it's been an interesting day for The Girls alright...