Chooks go bush

During the warmer months our flock of chooks follow behind the vegetable harvest. After the vegetables are pulled up, the chooks go in and enjoy the leftovers, scratch up and fertilise the ground.

Now it's Winter and it's time for them to come up onto higher ground which for us means into the bush.

But first we have to make a few modifications to fit their houses in.

Cutting a few trees down to make way for their houses means firewood for next year,

some bush poles for building our tractor shed,

and some sawdust.

Every year we are surprised by how much the chooks look at home in the bush and then we remember that they were originally jungle fowl.

I love this one of Mr Rooster mid crow.

Collecting the eggs.

This Mrs chicken stayed home....

Doesn't this look like the definition of free range?

Hello Banjo, we are friends.

Enjoying a dust bath.

We try to offer them pasture as well as bush but given the choice they much prefer the shelter of the trees and scratching amongst the leaf litter.

Girls' Day Out

When ever I watch a group of our hens having a dust bath together I imagine that they are on a girls' weekend.

You see so many of these groups of girls around Daylesford every weekend and I imagine them doing the same things and having the same conversations as our chooks.

They discuss their husbands, swap recipes, brag about their children and choose where to have their next meal.


I suppose they are having a sort of beauty treatment.
They are filling their feathers full of dust to rid them of mites and lice.
A kind of cut, colour and blow wave.