Chickens like to explore their world with their beaks. Their minds work somewhat along these lines…What’s that green thing? Peck. What’s that creepy crawly thing? Peck. What’s that shiny thing? Peck….you get the idea.

As you can imagine, I am used to getting pecked by my girls. They especially love the color red, so if I ever have colored nail polish on my toes, those are fair game. They also love anything that resembles a worm. There have been very comical episodes of them pulling on my shoe laces, or clothing ties. I posted them grabbing my knitting a month or so ago when they were still indoors.

Anyway, with all this pecking, I am very careful with my face. The girls don’t mean to be vicious (except for my dear Lulu), they just explore by pecking. Yesterday when I let the little ones out of the dog crate, Midnight jumped up onto my shoulder as she usually does. She’s a very sweet chicken, who likes to sit on my arm or shoulder. She kept craning her neck around to peer at my face. It made me nervous and I kept turning my face away from her. Unfortunately, while I wasn’t paying attention, she pecked me. On my eyeball. I didn’t blink in time.

The last two days have been filled with going to the eye doctor, getting antibiotic eye cream ($100/bottle!!), missing a freelance gig, and going back to the doctor. I figure that peck has cost me just shy of $700.

I had chicken for dinner last night. Just not one of mine.

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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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