Last weekend, every time I turned around I was sweeping mud off our back porch.  It’s a tiny little porch so I wasn’t getting too worked up about it but I just couldn’t figure out how Vince could be tracking so much mud onto the porch and I wasn’t getting a lot of mud in the house.

I never said anything to Vince about stomping his feet before he got to the porch but he finally said to me “Why don’t you take off your boots before you track all that mud onto the porch?”  Huh?  Why don’t YOU take off YOUR boots?  I’m not the one doing it.  Then he said “I’m not the one doing it either!”

Then I looked up and saw that a messy little bird is building a mud nest on the porch trim.

You can barely see it against the brown wood but it’s there.  At least we now know we should be blaming that little bird instead of blaming each other! 

Yesterday morning I noticed one of the tan colored chickens, our first batch, was puny.  She was mostly sitting and not running around with the other chickens.  After about an hour I checked back on her and she was still just standing in the corner with her eyes closed so I cleaned out the chicken hospital, put some fresh shavings, water and food in there and isolated her from the others.  Last night, she was no better and this morning she had passed away.

That’s our first chicken that has died.  Everyone always tells us that  you’re going to lose a few.  We got 10 in MO and didn’t lose any of them so it was hard losing one.  These chickens aren’t friendly and no matter how much I play with them, they just don’t want anything to do with me so it wasn’t as sad as it would have been had I lost one of my six red chickens in MO.

So, now we have 15 big chickens and 5 bantams and hopefully we won’t lose any more.