New Chicks 2013

We received our new baby chicks over the weekend - eight new baby birds are making their home inside our house right now - in our office.  The garage seemed too cold, and we are probably checking on them too much, but they are cute!

We have two Barred Rock older birds, and we ordered these chicks through the local farm store.  We did not want to order straight from the hatchery and have to deal with chicks in the mail, maybe because I never thought the post office would care enough to make sure they were handled correctly.

Sure enough, the nursery called last week - the chicks were "lost" for 48 hours in transit!  Luckily, most survived, but how do you lose a box of cheeping birds?  Seems like something you would notice.

All of our birds made it - we got:

2 Ameraucana
2 Black Astrolorps
2 Brown Leghorns
2 Wellsummer

The chicks in their bin:

Looking up information on chicks, I came across this poster from 1918.  I thought it was very fitting!  Why though, in our current recession / war, are we only being encouraged to spend at malls instead of doing work at home to help out?

Carter thought the chicks needed a roost, so he build one with his magnet squares!

They started roosting on it after a few minutes of scrambling and wondering what we put in there with them!

Lastly, I went out last night to feed the older birds, and sitting in a tree over the coop was our resident Great Horned Owl.  The picture is a bit fuzzy, as it was dark and I was getting as close as I could before he flew.  Good thing I have overhead protection on my chicken run!

Oysters on the Beach

A nice little family vacation over to the Olympic peninsula yielded a lot of foraging potential!

But the nice highlight of the trip was a stop by a small park on the way home up the Hood Canal.  Oyster shells covered the beach, individual shells and large clumps where multiple oysters had spurred off of previous shells.  It was a moderately low tide, but you could see out in the water a couple feet lower large piles of oysters ready for harvest!  At the elevation we were at, there were still quite a few good ones on the beach. 

This was definitely an example of bad preparation.  I had lost my knife early in the trip, and did not have any type of container to carry oysters home.  Luckily, Carter found me a sharp rock, which I used to pry open a couple of shells and slurp down right there on the shore.  Perfect!