So yeah we got a few more chickens the other day. One of them was a hen from Calderglen Country park that kept jumping out of its enclosure so they wanted to rehome her and the others were 3 Scots Grey hens and a cockerel. Unfortunately the cockerel didn’t go down to well with the neighbours or my sleep as you can imagine. With still being ill I’m not getting a good sleep anyway but to wake up every morning at 5am to the cockerel telling everyone in the neighborhood it was morning puts the icing on the cake.

We tried to rehome it at short notice but like most people looking to offload a cockerel we had no chance. So at 10pm on Monday night after trying to completely blackout the cockerels coop we decided that if that didn’t keep him quite to a reasonable hour that was it. So we went to sleep.

At 5.30am I woke up to the chickens morning call. By 6am I’d grabbed it mid crow and dispatched it. Its an awfully weird experience sitting on your back door step watching the sun come as you pluck a chicken. Especially when you live in a town as large as the one we live in! It was round about now that I realised that we never got any photos of Glen, as that was what we named him, before his run in with the broom handle. I’ll stick a LJ-cut style thing in here I think to spare those that may be squeamish from the pics.

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Most of you will have never heard about the British sit-com The Good Life so go here and you’ll start to understand why people are using it to describe our family recently.

It was the Easter Holidays this past weekend which sort of explains my absence from blogging but it’s mostly down to the chickens. I’m going to be blaming a lot on the chickens from now on…

Due to a bad run of weather at the tail end of last week we unfortunately didn’t manage to get the chicken run built but we did manage to finish off sealing/painting the coop before the birds turned up. Our garden is fully enclosed so finishing the run wasn’t that important but it does need finished before my wife returns to work this week so you can guess what my plans are for this evening!

On Saturday we drove out to a local village to meet someone that my wife had met on the Practical Poultry forums. After having a look around his garden and his setup I think my wife was insanely jealous but we came away with our two birds as well as a good few eggs for our incubator. Since then I have been trying to fit in building the run with the help of #2 and trying to fit in some quality time with the rest of the family.

So far I’ve managed to get a basic frame up which will let us get the wire mesh on tonight after a little bit of strengthening and once we’ve sourced the roofing we’ll get that on at a later date.

I’m not a carpenter as this picture will testify but hopefully it will do the job until we want to improve/update the run in a few years time.

So far from this project we’ve had questions from the kids on genetics, carpentry and sex. I think we’ve managed to answer everything we’ve been asked but some of the questions completely threw me at first! How do you sex baby chicks? How are eggs made? Why do only some of them hatch? Why is that bit of the run bent? I think we’ve came to understand that #1 knows everything there is to know about (as far as a 6 year old knows) about where eggs come from now and what makes a boy chicken and what makes a girl chicken. I’ve also came to understand that #2 isn’t as destructive as we think he is. I’ve never met a child that has the same effect on a room as a hurricane will have on campsite but in the hours that he was helping me his destructive streak turned into creative building session. When I hammered in the nails he spent the next 5 minutes hammering non-existent nails into the wood and checking that it was sturdy. You might think that it was just a son copying his father but he then spent the next 15 minutes building up the track for a wee plastic toy town we keep in our shed. He never does that. He usually plays with the cars and throws everything about instead.

It’s been a bit busy here these last few days in our house. Between work and more work I’ve just not had a second to myself.

In other news we had a few new additions to the family over the last two days. Our tropical fish managed to have babies. I say tropical fish in general as we had several pregnant fish but we aren’t sure exactly what one gave birth. They are that small that the colours aren’t showing yet so it may be a while. The kids seem really interested in them so we’ll see where that takes us.

We also took delivery of Bunty and Mac today.

Bunty is a Silver Laced Wyandotte bantam and Mac is a Scots Grey. We’ve also got a 15 eggs in our incubator and they are a mix of breeds so well see how they get on.

More updates over the next few days. I promise!