With the weather turning hot and the chicks getting most of their feathers, we decided to move them outside. I also made that decision because when we got back from our trip my desk was completely covered with thick layer of dust. It was quite incredible how much dust the 4 girls generated in one week. It looked as though we were in the middle of a big renovation project and the sawdust had settled all over our office.

I have read articles about free range chickens being raised indoors for the first several weeks (months?) of their lives. The farmers are allowed to do this because they claim it reduces the likelihood of disease or illness in the young hens. Once they open the doors to the outside the hens are so used to their confinement that they are terrified of going outside. Just as an aside, the terminology of being a free range hen states that they have “access to the outside”. This could be a paved yard. You can see a more lengthy post about this here.

Anyhow, when we opened the door to their cage, the girls looked very skeptical. It took some cajoling for them to venture outside. I might have even picked a few of them up and physically moved them. But after a while, they started to explore the yard and scratch and peck and munch to their hearts content.

Although they have grown exponentially, they are still too small to integrate with the big girls. There’s an initial smackdown when you introduce hens into an existing flock. These babies need to get a little bigger to give them a fighting chance. We have the door between our two runs closed off with the babes on one side and the big monsters on the other.

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