For this Flock Friday, I’m going to include the photos in chronological order, rather than grouping by ducks, new chickens, old chickens, and birds, like I usually do.
But as it happens, we start with the ducks anyway, exploring the northwest bank of the pond and the grass beyond:
Next is a sequence of shots from inside the old chicken coop, as the pop door opens. No, it isn’t snowing inside, that’s just the bedding dust getting stirred up by their wings:
One of the new chickens has started laying! Here’s the first new egg, laid outside (as I expected; there are only a few places private enough to lay, and this is one of them):
So that was what I was waiting for to open up the nesting boxes, previously covered with plywood to prevent them sleeping in there:
The new chickens investigating the nesting boxes:
The second egg, laid in a box:
A chicken coming out of a nesting box; now we know who is laying:
Since we had a chicken escape through the hole in the run roof, I decided to repair it, with welded wire instead of netting as before. Eventually I want to replace all of the roof netting with welded wire, though no point in doing that just before snow is likely:
Back to the ducks, on the edge of pond next to the overflow channel:
The ducks with their heads together:
As mentioned on my Dejus blog, it’s below freezing at night now, so I put out water heaters, including a heating pad under the hummingbird feeder to keep it from freezing. It hangs off paperclips to prevent the heating pad from touching the plastic base of the feeder, to avoid it melting:
A chicken in a nesting box, working on laying an egg (as seen from the outside access door):
The older chickens are still molting; there are feathers everywhere in their run:
I’m looking forward to them finishing that process, since they’ve pretty much stopped laying eggs at present. But having a rest is good for them.
The temperature is cold enough to partially freeze the pond overnight, though it is thawing during the day (for now):
That’s it for this week!