One of the things I have enjoyed over the past couple of days is putting things in the chicken run and seeing how they react to them – today I tried putting in some massive dandelions and it was pretty amusing. Two of my girls reacted as expected pecking little bits of dandelion off and eating them but the ginger one was hilarious. She kept walking over to a big dandelion and grabbing it in her beak, then flipping it up in the air and onto her back. She would then look around as if she didn’t know where it was, causing it to to drop back off onto the floor. Then she would toss it up onto her back again…
I also put some tomatoes in the run today – one whole and one in pieces. Turns out chickens don’t like tomato! They seem to like sweetcorn, most weeds and spiders – I put a huge spider in the run the other day and the grey one instantly killed it and eat it. Out of all the things I have put in so far the thing that they seem to enjoy the most is wild bird seed. Every now and then I chuck a handful in and they run around like crazy and eat it in no time. The white one and the ginger one just eat the seeds that land in front of them, but the grey one runs back and forth trying to steal seed off of the others. The funny thing is that she spends so long trying to stop the others eating that they eat most of it and she ends up with hardly any!
Today was the first bit of rain I’ve had since I got the chickens. They spent most of the time under the coop whilst it was raining (as expected) but when the rain had finished I looked in the garden and they were acting kind of weird – standing up tall and pecking at the wire mesh around the run. I went outside to investigate and it turns out they were drinking the water droplets that had collected on the wire mesh. I would have thought it was easier to drink out of the drinker that I put in there but then I’m not a chicken!