Do you ever get that feeling when you’re about to begin writing, and you don’t know where to start? In some cases, you could sit there for hours, waiting for something to come to mind? I know I’ve done that once or twice. But wouldn’t it be great if you could limit it down to a certain number of possibilities? It would certainly make the choice much easier. That’s one of the many reasons I’ve decided to begin writing through the alphabet.
What do I mean by “writing through the alphabet”? Well, think of it like this. For the next twenty-six weeks, I will write one post a week. As you can see in the title, today I started on A. Next week I’ll do B, the week after that C, etc. Not only does it help organize your posts, it also helps keep people on a schedule. You also know what you’re going to be writing about next week, so you can go ahead and begin working on it.
So what have I decided to write about for my “A” post? Well, a few things came to mind as I thought about it, but I finally chose to write about animals. Recently, we’ve been doing a lot revolving around animals. From raising chickens, to finding turtles, we’ve done it all. Most recently, we let some of our newest chickens out into the pen.
A few months back, we bought a lot of chicks. A good twenty-five or so. You may think this is a lot, but in reality it’s the average batch size, out in the country you can fit a lot of chickens in one pen, and still have a ton of room left over. But we didn’t just go and buy chickens for the heck of it, or for the eggs and meat. We had bought another batch of chickens previously. They were very fluffy, cute, and tiny, but they had a few other problems. We had to be so careful not to incubate or let those eggs get hatched because if they bred, it would create genetic problems, such as feather loss. Not to mention they were just so small. And to top it off, half the batch was roosters, so they fought a lot. It looked to me like this wasn’t their natural environment, maybe they came from farther north. Whatever the case, we eventually had to get rid of them. These were their replacement and we learned a valuable lesson.
When I first saw these chickens, I knew they were the type I prefer. Not the small, fuzzy, antisocial chickens. These are large, friendly chickens that are almost completely tame. They’ve spent most of their early life away from the rest of the chickens, but now that they’ve grown into larger, more capable birds so we’ve decided to let them out with the other chickens. When I say “Other chickens”, I’m not referring to the ones we got rid of. We still have a few that we’ve had for years, ones that are beginning to grow old for chickens. Those, are the ones I’m talking about.
It took as about thirty minutes to move all the chickens out. We would grab a chicken, go to the coop, and show them around inside. This is so they know how to come in at night. Then I would hand off the chicken to one of my brothers, who would then bring it into the pen. We repeated this with every chicken, then we showed them the water and food. After that, they began testing out their wings. Since we had them kept in a small brooder, this was the first time they had actually gotten the chance to fly. Now, you may be thinking that chickens can’t fly. That’s only partially true. They can fly, but only for short distances, such as across the pen (or out of the pen, if they choose to). And that’s what they would do, fly from one end of the pen to the other. It was pretty funny to watch, one would fly from one end, and another from the other end, and they would almost collide!
Aside from chickens, we’ve recently found huge turtles in our pool, a snake in the carport, and more. Sometimes, having all these animals around can get pretty annoying (like the snake, for example), but in general I don’t mind them. Of course, chickens are one of my favorite animals, and a whole lot more fun to play with than the snake was. Right down the street there is a large marsh, so as you could imagine, we get a few snakes.
But like I said, chickens are definitely one of my favorite animals. It’s the one animal we have in the most abundance. Unlike a few other chickens, these are friendly and healthy. They’re great layers, and worst-case scenario, they are good meat birds. But I don’t plan on eating these chickens, I enjoy them too much!
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