Thursday 25 April 2024

Chicks and keets

 We've got baby birds! With the chicken themed party for Lily, I decided it would be perfect to get her some chicks... and then I got some guinea fowl keets instead.

Originally I was looking at silkie or belgian d'uccle chicks, but we've had quite a few eastern brown snakes around the house, so we picked up the keets in the hopes they'll help deter snakes when they're older. 

Turns out Lily doesn't really like them as they are very flighty even though they were hatched in an incubator. So a week later we got some silkies, because they're supposed to make great pets for kids...

And they're almost as crazy as the guineas since they were raised by their mums for the first week. 

They're about 2 months old now (I should get updated photos) and altogether in a chicken tractor next to the house, although I think the silkies have had enough of the guineas who run and fly around all day. Luckily we're building their big coop so the guineas will move into that once it's finished, and get them used to the older girls who they'll be living with eventually.

The plan is to build garden beds for the tractor to sit on, that way the silkies can fill them up using the deep litter method, and clean up any garden beds that need a refresh in the future. These little fluff balls will have an important job as well as being pets. Now we just have to wait and find out the gender ratio to decide who we're keeping - it currently looks like I've got three boys and three girls with no favourites to tip the scale.

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