Chicken Run

As I may have mentioned before, we have about an acre and a half of land and on this nice little plot is a small barn. Half the barn is a chicken coop. So, with Spring here, it was time to go to the feed store and get some baby chicks. We've learned from experience that having a rooster around is a lot of trouble and it's just easier to get new chicks than to hope to hatch some of our own.

So a few Saturdays ago we loaded the rugrat into the SUV and head to town. We came back with a couple of large bags of pine bedding for the coop a 50lb sack of crumbles (chick food), and a box with 10 little peepers in it.

The hubinator hauled everything down to the barn and then decided that the weather was still too cold for the chicks to go in the barn, even with heat lamps. Now, the sunroom where we've incubated chicks before is currently occupied by cats, so that wasn't an option. Furthermore, the large steel tub we had kept chicks in before had been rusted out, so we didn't have anything to keep them in. Finally we hit upon a solution.

We brought a large, plastic garden cart/wheelbarrow-type thing into the basement to keep the chicks in under heat lamps until they could grow some. Now, we realized that this meant our basement would soon smell like chickens, but we really didn't have any other choice. The chicks needed time to grow before they could handle cooler weather.

Grow they did.

I went to check them this morning and something didn't seem quite right. I did a head count on them - not easy to do when you have nervous chicks running around in circles in a plastic tub. 9. I checked again. Still 9. One was missing.

I look around the basement and see no sign of him. I'm fairly confident that he's not dead - but hope and pray that he hasn't decided to hide out under the stairs where I would NEVER be able to reach him. As I move the bag of food and bucket of clean pine shavings out of the way, I see chicken droppings on the floor next to the cart. Ah-ha! Confirmation that one actually got out instead of being abducted by aliens!

I carefully move the heat lamps and roll the cart out of the way - sending the remaining 9 chicks into a new flurry of frenzied peeping and flapping. Once the cart is out of the way I see him - the loan chick - perched on the edge of a scrap of paneling I had propped up against the wall, looking completely befuddled. His peeping became more frantic as I moved closer, but he apparently was too afraid to move, because he didn't budge as I reached to him and gently picked him up.

I carried the squirming, peeping little bundle back to the cart and put him in before rolling the cart back in place and setting up the heat lamps again. A little fresh food and water, and the peepers all quickly settled down.

If there is one thing experience has taught me - this is just the start. We still don't have a cover for the cart, so I'm expecting to have to chase the little sucker down again tomorrow - maybe even an accomplice or two.

It's all part of life here on the edge of chaos.