There has been a major disruption this week to our household routine.
You would not think that such a small little thing would cause so much trouble. Just over three weeks ago we decided that we would let one of our old and broody Buff Orpingtons sit on an egg.
We kept this to one egg as we did not want to find ourselves with a whole load of cockerels.
It is difficult to keep a lot of cockerels together as they generally fight and would make a lot of noise.
They are difficult to rehome and putting them to sleep is just not an option.
We reckoned that we could manage two cockerels if need be.
Our cockerel is a young bird and quite new to the household and I thought that the egg would probably be infertile and did not hold out much hope for success.
Consequently we were quite surprised and found ourselves quite unprepared when we found a very protective mother and a very small little yellow chick in the nesting box.
When I say mother, I really mean mothers.
Our other Buff Orpington had been taking it in turns to incubate the egg and is now sharing the rearing.
The first thing we realised was that our normal chicken food was not suitable for chicks so I had to shoot off to the animal feed store to get some chick food.
Our nine dogs are very respectful of the chickens but a little fluffy chirping creature would probably be irresistible to our terriers.
This means that our dogs who normally spend quite a lot of time in the garden now have time out in a rota system.
Dogs out, chickens shut in and vice versa. This also applies to our 14 cats.
It also means that when we take our dogs out to their toilet area we now have to take them on leads instead of being loose.
All of this we are very happy to do.
We are very much aware how easy it is to lose small chicks to accident or disease and the whole family (my wife and I plus five children) are determined to do our best to ensure this chick reaches adulthood.
