Progressing smoothly

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday have all been fairly similar.

Sunday saw Greta finally trust us enough to start eating grapes from our fingers, well mostly she tries to snatch them and run, but will stay and eat them if we hold on tightly enough.

Lumi will now even jump for treats, the Greed is strong in this one. She has also taken to jumping up on the bench and will even let us sit next to her, though touching is not allowed.

Monday 21st.

Lumi has worked out how to jump the mesh fence. 5 days is all it took to escape the enclosure, there'll be no stopping them now. Greta escaped Tuesday. Mostly they just seem to fret about being away from the others and spend their time trying to get back in again anyway :).

Harriet ignored us all Sunday, we were worried we were going backwards with her, but no, apparently she just doesn't like grapes. Yoghurt however, is the best of all treats, all three of them will eat yoghurt off Robert's finger. It's adorable. Unfortunately, they're still scared of bowls, but I remember Agnes and Ripley taking a few days to trust bowls too.

Harriet is also ok with shelled sunflower seeds.

They all managed to sleep on the perch Monday night with no prompting, hooray! Unfortunately Lumi still feels the need to shove Harriet off the perch. This seems like unfixable chicken politics. Greta has at least worked out siting against the right wall with Lumi to the left will ensure she doesn't get shoved off too.

Tuesday. 

They now associate us with food so they run up whenever we first walk over to them now :).

We spent about an hour hand shelling sunflower seeds for them today, which was a little ridiculous :). For some reason they can't work out how to eat the seeds whole, though I'm sure they'll work it out soon enough. It's so weird looking at their food container with the top covered in sunflower seeds, where they've eaten around them. Agnes and Ripley caused all sorts of trouble by scooping all the other grains out just to get to the sunflower seeds.

These weren't shelled, and therefore were unacceptable.

Each afternoon around 5pm Greta says it's bedtime. She walks into the coop and jumps up onto the the perch. She then jumps back down, walks out to the other chickens and repeats the process about a dozen times trying to convince Lumi and Harriet to come to bed. She clucks angrily about half the time. It's adorable, but so ineffective.

Lumi deciding against going to sleep.