Back to the chickens: The girls got big pretty quickly. It was fun to watch them grow, but the pool on the porch wasn’t going to work too much longer. Adam needed to get started on the coop. That was quite a process and honestly I was really impressed by it. The plan was to use salvaged barn wood and build a coop that we could have many more chickens in the future if we decided to. It took time though because we had to wait for enough of the right kind of wood to finish it.
We started to let the girls free-range after a few months. They would pretty much stay together and really enjoyed all the mulberries they found on the ground. The porch was a MESS from their purple foot prints and purple poop. Another thing that was interesting is that right before dusk they would all line up by the porch door so they could come back inside. However, if it wasn’t dusk—just try to get them inside! We had a rough go of it on our anniversary. All dressed up and ready to go, but the girls were out and we spent over a half an hour chasing them so that we could leave. We lost a few chickens to predators too. The price of being free-range, but still it was pretty sad.
By the end of the summer the coop was ready for move in. I BLEACHED the porch floor and for the most part all was well with it again. It took a bit for the girls to get used to their new home. We laughed at them at night because they all just huddled together on their perches and looked super scared. A couple of times we heard noises that sounded like a half cock-a-doodle come from the coop, but we just shrugged it off.
On my birthday we went out. One of the kids had shut the door before all of the girls got back in for the night. When we got home we heard some noise and Adam went outside and saw a possum run off into the woods. There was a ton of white feathers. Marilyn. Adam searched and searched with a headlamp for the other girls. He found a few and put them safely back into the coop. Still no sign of Marilyn and being that she was bright white and there was no sign of her, we were pretty sure we had lost her. The next morning I woke up early and went outside. There she was! Looking ROUGH! Poor thing had been through it, but she was in tact shaking her feathers in the middle of the driveway. We were so relieved!
End of Part 2.
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