Quick Chick Update

All thirteen chicks survived their first week in our house.

They've moved out of their newborn stage, getting bigger and more active and sprouting flight feathers and tail tufts. They spend more time wandering around their (twice-expanded) indoor enclosure, peeping, bickering and hopping up onto their feeders and waterers.

This is a good thing, because whenever they were sleeping with their faces flopped right down in the mulch, I would get all mother-of-newborn on them and poke them to make sure they were still breathing. Fortunately, unlike newborn humans, I didn't have to deal too much with the consequences of waking them up.

C thought they were being deprived by living indoors all the time, without any contact with the outside world, so he took them outside, where the boys herded them and worked on their flying lessons and tried to feed them worms.

They were more interested in eating dirt, apparently filling up their gizzards for digestion. E, Z and M insist they can tell them apart and have named them things like Thunder, Tornado, Twister, Spark and Zephyr. They're very meteorological birds. In the meantime, C is looking for ways to get out of building a coop. "We could just convert the playhouse," he said. His mom offered up the suggestion of getting an old car and using that. Or her usual standby suggestion of free range in the basement. I'm busy looking up coop plans and coop kits.