Worms & eggs

Saturday 10th. After 5 days of only seeing the girls for about 2 minutes a day I felt a bribe of worms was in order. Pet City only had gigantic meal worms, at $15 for 50g! Ridiculous, we really need to attempt our own worm colony.

Lumi and Harriet jump all over us for the worms now so I'm starting the process of training them to jump onto our arms. I believe they now understand us tapping on surfaces means "jump up", but naturally, they do whatever they want. It's just a matter of continuing to show them we're not going to hurt them and them being impatient enough to jump for the treat. 

many worms. much flapping. wow

Greta takes at least two minutes to eat a single worm, and she can only achieve that because we literally hold Lumi & Harriet back. Because the only thing better than a meal worm, is a meal worm stolen from another chicken. It really was a lot of fun with the bigger worms, the girls really enjoyed them, so much flapping, twisting, jumping and thievery. The most epic theft was when Harriet & Lumi were on my lap, Harriet stole a worm off Lumi and jumped onto the ground to run away, only Lumi was too quick and jumped directly onto Harriet. I'm pretty sure Lumi got the worm back. Harriet was fine.

Not my fault Lumi, you were too slow again

I got my first injury from Lumi on Sunday morning, it is actually my worst chicken related injury to date, there was quite a bit of blood. I was holding her and she got impatient and scrabbled at my leg to get down, only her claws are ridiculously sharp. Oops.

By mid morning Lumi decided it was time to lay. It was going to be her first time. She would jump up to the laying boxes, sit in them, arrange the straw just so, and would jump back down to the ground again. She put little pieces of straw on her back, not sure why, but Agnes used to find that helpful too. Up and down she went, whinging the entire time. Then she crawled under the mesh fence and jumped up onto the compost bin. All panic stations were then manned because she was only a short jump onto the property fence and potentially into the neighbour's yard (they have a dog). She looked so proud of herself standing on that bin too, she was successfully herded back into the pen. About 2 minutes later she wedged herself back under the mesh fence to nibble at the mint. We then locked all of them in the coop until Lumi was done. Unfortunately she laid on the ground, but at least it was in the coop, which is better than some random location. The egg was about the size of my thumb, so much effort for such a tiny egg. 

It'd been a long time since we'd witnessed the "where shall I lay" dilemma. It really is adorable. Ripley's dilemma inside the house when they were sick was probably the best. She wouldn't stop whingeing, so we let her out of the cage, she spent ages pacing on the couch, then jumping between the bed and Robert's lap, finally trying to wedge herself in a tiny gap in the bookshelf. We then realised she wanted to lay an egg, and put her back in the cage because there really wasn't any better place for her. Naturally I photographed the entire ordeal, because that's what you do when your loved one is having hilarious issues.