Greensboro Birds

What we’ve learned about chicks: They grow very quickly when they’re fed a steady diet of starter/grower feed and are allowed to roam free in the yard for long stretches at a time. So quickly, in fact, that living in a pet carrier (much less the box they arrived in) is neither feasible nor healthy. The neighbor kids were out of town for longer than expected, and the chicks needed a bigger home, so Josh and I cobbled together a makeshift coop from stuff we had laying around—mostly the wood from some raised beds we built before the backyard redo.

My favorite engineering feat is the hinged lid system (which has since been improved by cutting the tarp in half and stapling each half to a door, so now we don’t have to wrangle the tarp before opening the doors; the tarps overlap in the middle to protect the inside from rain). The whole thing is a little rough, but considering we’ve never made anything like this before, I think we did a pretty good job. Happy and Tito like being able to watch the chickens, and the chickens like pecking at Happy and Tito when they get close.

The kids eventually returned from vacation and saw how big their chicks grew, and we realized that they didn’t have anything at their house to accommodate these now-larger birds. What to do?

Chicken daycamp! We agreed to let the chicks live in our little pen until the kids and their folks build one of their own. Since these photos were taken a few days ago, both birds have grown by about another third in size and have many more adult feathers. You can practically watch the feathers pop out, it happens so fast. Let’s hope the neighbors get their coop built soon, or we’ll have to expand this one to accommodate them!

However, do you think the larger chicken might actually be a rooster? These birds are about six or seven weeks old, if that helps ID their gender. I don’t know much about young chickens, so I can’t judge for sure, and these guys are different breeds, making comparison irrelevant. If it is a rooster, it’ll eventually have to be relocated to a place that can put up with such a noisy fellow.