It will be three weeks this Sunday since getting our four Rhode Island Red pullets. It’s been an eggciting week here as we have had a total of 9 eggs laid since Monday. We thought we had narrowed it down to two of the girls, but that third egg yesterday made us think three hens were laying. But today we only got two eggs – so maybe they are all laying and take a day off every so often. They just started laying their eggs for the first time, so they are still figuring things out I’m guessing, as am I.
I’ve had so much fun watching them in the outdoor run hop around on the old wood ladder we never got around to putting in the wood furnace this winter. So glad it was too big to throw in and too lazy to fetch the sawz-all to slice it up, The chickens love it! After seeing that some enjoy sitting up on a swing, I made one out of some parachute cord and a thin piece of wood, also not burned this season.
Decorating the outdoor run with old logs and rocks has been so fun and I love watching them climb and hop around on all the obstacles I provided for them. As a new chicken mama, I couldn’t help but buy them a couple of toys as well. I read that they enjoy pecking at a xylophone, so about two weeks ago I bought a colorful, cheap xylophone and threw it in the outdoor run. They only seemed to peck at it when I tossed some grass on top of it and as they pecked at the grass it chimed a little. Not a lot. Occasionally one of them would walk on it and cause it to click, clack for a second.
A couple of days ago, I was in the outdoor run tidying things up when I noticed that the xylophone was gone. I had been raking their dust bath area and adding in more wood ash from our outdoor wood furnace and herbs from our garden, so I was pretty certain they hadn’t buried it somehow. But how could that happen? I had Mark take a look too just in case I missed it somehow. He didn’t find it either and is a little concerned about potential poltergeists with weird musical tastes now.
There is no way that an animal like a chipmunk or anything else could have dragged it out. We both just checked for breaches in our runs security – no breaches. This seems like a case for Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsie Twins perhaps!
