Thursday, March 11, 2010

The girls

Coop and I came home from Orscheln's last week with this tiny green box:

Four baby chicks!!

Ouch.  That doesn't look comfortable.

When we first got them home:

The black one is a Black Australorp.  But the other three came out of a "random egg layers" cage, so they could be anything.  The red one is likely a Rhode Island Red.  The mostly yellow one (with a bit of orange -- far right in the above picture; far left in the below picture) may be a Orpington or a New Hampshire Red.  And the yellow one with gray overtones -- who knows.  We won't really know for sure until the chicks grow up, but that's our best guess for now.


As of yesterday, a week after we brought them home, they're getting their feathers, including the cutest tiniest little tail feathers:
Snuggled together for sleeping.


And in other agri-business news, it appears that our bees survived the winter:
We thought for sure they'd be toast by now -- before the winter, something happened (invading bees maybe?) and they had no honey stored up to eat throughout the winter.  We fed them some sugar water a couple of times, and then just sealed them up for winter.  This weekend, we went out and found them all abuzz!  How crazy!

2 comments:

Karen said...

Those chicks are adorable! The red one in particular is just gorgeous. I bet Cooper was incredibly excited when you brought them home!

And good job to the bees for sticking it out through the long, cold winter!

Anonymous said...

Do your bees live in a bee ghett? Looks like they got tagged over the winter.