Meet the Chickens!

With the coop all finished, we had a wonderful time searching out chickens to live in it!  We now have a perfect flock of a dozen month-old chicks:  3 Black Australorps, 3 Ameraucanas, 3 Barred Rocks, and 3 Rhode Island Reds.

You can see some of them above - they are never all together to get good shots, but this was a precious time, as I watched them taking a "bath"... look below and see them tossing the pine shavings all over!

...then they picked them off of each other...

...before settling down to a cozy nap!

I just love that picture!  That's one of our Barred Rocks - they are my particular favorite right now, but I am completely and totally in love with all of these little darlings!  They are still a bit cautious of me, but we're taking it slow and they're beginning to warm up to my constant trips out to the coop to "check" on them (read: find any excuse whatsoever to go gawk at them).  Here you can see them eating out of my hand!  Shown in this group are the 3 Black Australorps and the 3 Ameraucanas.

That yellow colored one is technically the only chick that has a name at this point:  "Pearl".  The other two Ameraucanas are the brown ones in the back.  We can tell them apart (one has softer shading than the other), but we don't have names picked out for them yet.  As for the other 3 breeds, I don't think we'll be able to tell them apart, so they may never get named... we'll see.

Here's one of our Rhode Island Reds:

And here's one of the Black Australorps:

But I would be remiss if I did not share with you the chicken that was technically our first... meet "Goose". 

She belongs to some friends of ours who were going on vacation.  They asked us to watch her since she was too small to join the rest of their flock.  They don't know what breed she is and they have not given her a name, but we started calling her "Goose" the first night she was here and it just stuck.  She is absolutely the sweetest thing - follows me around like a puppy and seems to enjoy being held - by ANY of us.  She was a PERFECT introduction to the world of chicken-keeping, and if she weren't so much bigger than our others, we'd offer to keep her.   As it stands, she has the entire run to play in while the smaller chicks are inside.  You can see her below checking out the water fount.

If you were to tell me years ago that I would one day have a flock of chickens, I'd have told you that you were off your rocker.  There's no way my city-loving husband would stand for such absurdities!  But here we are!!!  And I'm one happy mother-hen!!