Chicken Talk

We've had our chickens since early spring, now, and we are happy with our brood of eight.  They are giving us at least 6 eggs a day, sometimes on a good day, seven.  We have so many that I've been able to give some away to family and neighbors which they have been happy to take.

 
We have a coop in which they sleep and lay their eggs, then a fenced enclosure where they can take their dust baths and that is also where our compost pile is and they love hunting around in it.  You can tell when they tire of that and start hanging around the gate to be let out into the grass yard which is where they spend most of their day .They enjoy wandering the yard, scratching, looking for worms and fighting over the big ones.  When they see Chuck digging with a shovel they'll run over, hoping for more worms, it's really funny as he often has one climb onto his shovel as he scoops.  We cook them corn on the patio in a crock pot and when Chuck whistles you should see them come a running from wherever in the yard they are, making us laugh.  We've had some problems to deal with.  One of the chickens found his way into the neighbor's yard several days in a row resulting in Chuck having to climb over the fence to try and retrieve him.  One night he couldn't catch him and the chicken spent the night in the bushes.  He finally learned his lesson, though, after getting chased by two dogs till he had no energy left and was finally rescued.  He now stays in our yard.  Another problem was I decided to extend the garden and plant some vegetables and herbs in the upper yard where they wander.  They scratched my newly planted vegetables up, so we put a temporary fence around it and they found their way into there.  I finally gave up and put another bed in the lower yard.  Another day they got in the front yard and scratched in the flower bed around our waterfall and clogged it up with bark and dirt, resulting in three hours of draining the waterfall and cleaning it out. We tried another temporary fence which worked this time as they haven't gotten out in the front, again.
We had one of the chickens, the littlest one which is a banty chicken, decide to stay on her nest for days.  We got concerned as we had read about chickens becoming egg bound.  After calling for expert advise we were told she probably had a strong nesting instinct and was trying to hatch some eggs.  The other chickens were laying their eggs right by her and she was sitting on all of them trying to keep them warm.  Since we don't own a rooster, it's not going to happen, poor girl!