Chickens in the Mail

Although it's still the end of January, I'm thinking forward to spring: seed starting and chicks! I'm eager to start lettuce greens. And we’ll be making our spring chick order from Murray McMurray Hatchery soon too. Then, we'll get the early morning phone call from our local Post Office that our box of chicks have arrived.

Chicks travel through the mail? Read more about that in my “Slow Lane” column in Country Gardens magazine; the Early Spring 2012 issue is on the newsstands now. Here’s an excerpt:

“A small box of live chicks is a funny sight. So we stare down at them for a long moment—taking in the strangeness of a world where chicks can be sent through the mail like birthday cards or electric bills—then close the box and drive home."

Pecking Order in Action

It's spring. So it's chick time.

A teenaged barred rock hen is the newest addition to the Cat Crossing Farm menagerie. The owner of a local coffee shop called my husband Doug and said there was a chicken running around their parking lot. The coffee shop is in an urban area so it's not likely that the chick just hatched somewhere in the bushes and developed a taste for coffee...

So, of course, Doug went to get her. Now's she's living in our greenhouse until she's big enough to go into the hen house.

We also inherited 8 cute fluffy chicks that were used for a magazine photo shoot. They are in the greenhouse too.

And here's what we learn from chickens: That pecking order thing? It's real. Our big hens tried to peck Coffee Shop Chicken (and that's why she's living in the greenhouse). And although you'd think that this experience would soften Coffee Shop Chicken to the tiny chicks, she has nothing but evil-chicken-eyes for them.

I assume they will all get along someday...