Moving time for chickens

Since Brave Chicken (we are struggling with what to call him now perhaps Rooster) decided he was a he not a she, he has been practicing his cockle doodle doo. It is not perfected yet and goes co cockle co cockle at the moment, but it is quite loud so we have had to move them from right outside the bedroom window. We haven't gone far with them, just round to the end of the house, we will have to see if that is far enough.

Before we could start moving them we needed to fix the wood pile at the end of the house. It was collapsed when we arrived in May. It has been on the backlog to have something done about it for a long time.

We wheel barrowed the fallen stuff round to the concrete behind the barn where all the wood from the outdoors kitchen went. Doing this gave horrible flashbacks to all the work involved doing that. But this only took 22 barrow loads. It is suprising how many loads it takes to move what looks like a small amount of wood.

Because we were moving the enclosure only a little bit some of the old area was going to be in the new. The plan was to round up the chickens to the end of the old enclosure that would be in the new. When we approached Big Chicken and Little Chicken paniced and busted out of the enclosure. Big Chicken seemed quite happy pecking around and little chicken hid in the bushes.

Once we moved the enclosure we herded them back in, so all ok in the end. This is a video of Big Chicken being herded, mainly so you can hear the excellent chicken noise she makes (accurately imitated by Doug I think...)

If it hadn't been Big Chicken we would have left them in the hope they would manage to bust back in again by themselves but we didn't want to lose the only egg layer!. Unfortunately the upheaval seems to have put her off laying today. Or perhaps it is unrelated, Rooster deciding he is a he seems to have put her off her stride a bit, maybe because she is the only mature female and is getting a lot of attention.

Safe back in the enclosure

Hillbilly bench