Chicken Portraits

Our boys finally started practicing their little baby crows, which means we had to re-home them back to my friend. I could have probably kept them for a few more days, until the first real (loud!) crows came, but Grumpy Neighbor is still actively trying to manipulate us into getting rid of our chickens (Did I tell you that he offered to pay us $500 to get rid of them? Sigh), and so I think he'd probably call 911 or run over with a shotgun if heard so much as a single crow--so off the boys must go.

Before the two boys left, however, we took an afternoon to take portraits with them. These are in the same vein as our foster kitten portraits, only with chickens, they're even more silly:

Fluffball

Cluck and Peck, our two boys

 Cluck

Peck

Arrow

all four 

 watching them forage while out on a "field trip" from their yard

The girls held Cluck and Peck on their laps the whole trip out to my friend's farm to leave them. She'll wait to harvest them until they've grown up a bit more and she can be entirely sure that they're boys, and in the meantime she sometimes sends us photos of the two sitting on her porch rail and looking quite pleased with this free-range life that they've made their way into.

Our girls, meanwhile, don't seem to miss the boys a bit. Their coop and yard is perfectly comfy for the two of them, although they escape just often enough to drive poor Matt to distraction as he cobbles on yet another fence rail or wire bit to try to foil them--the good new is that he's perfectly on board now with my conviction that we must buy a new house that we can afford to double mortgage with this one while we prepare it to sell. A cobbled-together chicken yard just outside the master bedroom window is the last straw, really. A buyer could perhaps overlook the kid-painted front door, perhaps overlook the seashells glued to the bathroom door frame, perhaps overlook the big basement timeline, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, is going to buy a home that has a chicken yard right outside the master bedroom window.

Except for me, of course, I adore it. And when we find a new house, I might do it again!