Day two - the chicks move house

This is a two day old chick.

Today we had to perform a major reshuffle – the living arrangements just weren’t working out.

The playhouse in the garden had been converted to a nursery for two sister hens.  The 9 Christmas chicks and their mother hen, Alice, were sharing it with Angelina who is still waiting expectantly for her eggs to hatch in a few more days.

My plan was that the cousins would all live together, play together and the mothers would share the parenting -- kind of like what my sisters and I are doing with our children these school holidays.

This morning I discovered that Alice had shifted herself and all 9 chicks into Angelina’s nest. After settling in and even pushing some of her chicks under Angelina, that bossy mother started rolling her sister’s unhatched eggs out of the nest.

So now I’ve moved her into another little hen house inside the main chook house; at least until Angelina’s eggs hatch.

Relocating 9 chicks and a grumpy protective mother hen is harder than it sounds. It's twice as hard with three children under the age of five helping. It's much more risky than I usually engage in when Tiny (our tortoise shell puss - see below) is lurking in the shade beside the veggie patch.

Turns out it was my fault.

The chicks couldn’t get back into the barrel where they had been hatched.

I only realised this when I went out to check them at dusk and discovered Alice huddled up with them on the cold grass in the corner of her new lodgings. 

I’ve put in a little make-shift ramp at the hole so they can get in.  I’ve also topped up the nesting material so there’s less of a lip for them to negotiate to get out. So now they're happy but I'm covered in mosquito bites.

The upside is that if there are plenty of mozzies around where she's raising the chicks, that's actually a great thing. I'll try to photograph it tomorrow to share with you.