Ah, chicken butt. Beaks and fuzzy butts are the two things that look pretty much the same from chickhood on up.

~~~~

Well everyone made it through their first night. The temperature in the terrarium stayed a constant 95 degrees. Betty is pecking at everything to see if it’s worth eating, including the new feathers on her sisters. She also seems to be very good at finding bits of feed that’s wandered into Hilda and Willy’s fluff.  Poor Hilda just wanted to take a nap this morning, but other two apparently have a different schedule.

I think you can see a change from yesterday. The new “real” feathers are more visible on their wings and the girls are  certainly gaining weight.

	Willy

	Betty

	Hilda

After our long trip it was comforting to see everything was pretty much the same. The roses are coming into bloom, there are plenty of oranges on the trees, and the sourdough starter is still alive. And yet it feels a little off …there aren’t more animals around. Milton, the dear, is a pretty quiet dog and doesn’t take up as much space as Zack used to. Then there were the chickens whose presence took up a surprising amount of room. I’ve particularly missed watching them doing their morning inspection of the back yard during my morning coffee. Well that changed yesterday with a trip to the feed store in the rain to inspect the horse troughs full of peeping chicks.

Here are our new girls:

Willy is a Golden-Lace Wyandotte, and in about six months, she’ll be laying medium-brown eggs. I chose her because of the glamorous look of the mature bird. (Willy is short for Wilhemina.)

Those of a certain age might recall Foghorn J. Leghorn, ruler of the Looney Tunes barnyard. Hilda here is a distant cousin being a Barred Leghorn. Since everybody seems to be focusing on brown eggs, it seemed like a fun idea to get white ones. I’m a little apprehensive as Leghorns don’t have the best reputation as backyard pets. Hopefully our hand-raising will make her less flighty.

Leghorn chickens, by the way. are named for the city of Leghorn, better known to us as Livorno. And instead of saying “leg horn”, we’re really supposed to say “leggern”.

And finally we have Betty, a Maran (French in origin). She is probably of the Cuckoo variety, developing the black and white barring like Hilda when she feathers out.  The color of her eggshells will be a very rich brown.

They’re all two or three days old. They took to the warm terrarium where they’ll stay for about month very well, quickly figuring out where the food and water are. Betty seems a little delicate, hopefully just from the long trip. It’s alarming, then hilarious to watch them dashing about only to suddenly drop to the floor to take a nap.

Our feed store has posted a schedule of chick arrivals online so I’ve been able to pore over descriptions and choose the ones for us. It would be nice to get an Ameracauna to complete the egg-color spectrum when next week’s shipment comes in. Her name will be Mandy (as in Amanda).

If it’s not obvious yet, they’re all named after the women on Ugly Betty.

[Concord Feed & Fuel’s chick arrival dates]

No, we didn’t disappear in Spain a couple of weeks ago. The rest of our trip was as fascinating and wonderful as the part before, although with some major “incidents”. I’ll write about those soon.

It didn’t seem we’d been gone for over two months, but walking in the door, looking at two months of piled-up mail and two months of weeds in the backyard, it’s obvious some time has passed.

I’ll be catching up on the rest of the trip over the next week or so. Meanwhile, thanks for reading about our exploits!

   Tom and Dale