More About The Baby Chicks

Found out the 2 new babies we brought home from Ed's Pet World were 3 weeks old and came from a teacher who had hatched several chicks for a classroom project. Explains why the babies seem so traumatized. We still can't seem to make them as friendly as the original 4, although I think if I feed the black fiesty one enough worms, he may warm up to me a bit. He's always best friends with me for about three minutes after worm time. For the record, feeding baby chicks worms, is about the cutest thing I've ever seen. One will grab it, start peeping in this weird way, and running as fast as possible in circles around the brood with his prize. All the other babies will start chasing the one with the worm. Life's simple pleasures.

The original 4 are now 14 days old while the 2 new ones (and smaller ones, strangely enough) are 25 days old.

Peepers (the one using only one leg) is still , eh hem, only using one leg, but using it much better! She's starting to flap her wings a little bit (the others started flapping well over a week ago and some are almost flying outright). Once she gets good use of her wings, she'll probably be in much better shape with just her one leg. The joint isn't swollen anymore, mostly b/c she's just so good at using the one leg that she doesn't lean/limp on the other one anymore. Definitely starting to look like she'll never use that leg, but she seems happy. She's still very small compared to the one's she hatched with, but she's about the same size as the new black one (Beej). They're buddies, it seems. They snuggle. It's soo sweet. She was the loner before now.

Since the babies are getting pretty big, and I still don't have their coop ready, I've been leaving the door open to their brood (the large dog carrier w/ a light) so they can run out for a few minutes a day. At first, none of them ever left the brood even if I left the door open. I started to think, I could have stuck a lamp on a mat, and that would have worked fine for these babies. Eventually all of them, except Peepers started venturing out a bit though. But today, Peepers came out.

I keep trying to take each one outside (outside, outside) to explore, individually, but they mostly just seem scared, uninterested,.... and scared. Maybe they need to all go out together to stay brave, but I'm too scared for that :). We have a viscous cat in the neighborhood. Pebbles was out today when Normal (the cat) came creeping up. Usually Pebbles isn't afraid of me, but when I saw Normal and immediately threw my hands out to scoop up Pebbles, of course, Pebbles starting screeching and fleeing me (towards Normal of course). That was a little scary. Lesson learned: Don't act afraid around a chicken unless you want the chicken to be afraid too. They pick up on those things.