Freedom...or Survival of the Luckiest

One of our hens went broody a few months ago.  I let her sit on a clutch of eggs, but she only ended up hatching out one live chick.  She and her lone chick were housed in one of the smaller pens in the barn for several weeks, but they had to vacate pending other "renters" (I'll explain next post).

Instead of just kicking the hen & her still-smallish chick out to the proverbial curb, I set them up in our chicken tractor.  Which was actually a vast improvement as they would now have fresh grass, sunshine and bugs to eat instead of being cooped up in the, well, coop.

Of course, it turns out that her little chick is a rooster.  And we already have five roosters here. Which I still have to buy chicken scratch for and I don't really want any more useless beaks to feed.  So yesterday I decided that it was time to let the hen and her little cockerel out of the chicken tractor into the wide open spaces of Krazo Acres.

From prisoners.....

to making a break for it......

....to FREEDOM!  Notice that we put a shock collar on Charlie.
We don't want him thinking it was Free Chicken Nugget Day on the farm.

I'm wasn't sure if she'd remember to go back into the coop at night, or if she'd stay with her chick outside if he couldn't manage / didn't want to follow her in there.  Call me heartless, but I didn't go looking for him much when dusk came around.  I figured if he made it, he made it.  If not, oh well.

But lo & behold, when I went outside this morning, he was in the front yard.....and not just a pile of bones and feathers.  He had gone back to the chicken tractor and hung out there.  He wasn't able to get inside of the tractor, so was still vulnerable to nocturnal chicken-munching critters, but he made it though the night.  I opened the big chicken coop and momma hen made her way back to him.  He's going to eventually have to learn to get up in the coop or he probably won't make it to his first cock-a-doodle-do.

I'm glad the mother hen found her way back to the coop and I hope that she starts laying eggs again because I'm only getting two or three eggs a day now from the whole lot of them.

And the general lack of eggs is one of the reasons I kicked them out of the pen anyhow.  I had to make room for the new recruits.