Moving to the new coop

Another week has gone by and the babies are growing up so quickly!  The project this weekend was to get everyone moved out to the new garage coop.  So nice to have my office space back and to not have the living room smell like pine shavings!  Actually, the chickens themselves weren't too bad, but the ducks are horribly messy.  Plus at the rate they are growing they really needed more space than our over-sized tub could offer.

The girls are in a really funny looking stage right now - they are about halfway covered in regular feathers and halfway covered in baby fluff.  Very much some ugly "ducklings" here!  It is so interesting to see the new feathers coming in and to watch the color transformation.  Hard to believe that they are the same chipmunky little creatures we brought home three weeks ago.

I am starting to wonder if Ginger is a day or two younger than the other chicks.  She is still one of the most adventurous ones - all this week she followed Curry around on her escapades to escape from the tub.  She is taking the longest to get the feathers in.  So far she seems like she is going to be a dusty-brown color:

 

Don't tell anyone, but I think Basil is going to be my favorite.  She definitely stands out from the rest of the group with her black and white coloring.  More black on the top and cute little spots coming in on her chest feathers.  She is also the calmest of the four and the least likely to try and escape:

Paprika is also relatively calm, not likely to explore but the first to try and hop out of the tub when I am in there messing around with feed, water, and litter changes.  She and Curry appear to have similar feather colors coming in, though she is slightly darker overall:

Curry remains the bad girl of the bunch, constantly testing the boundaries and finding any weak spots in the containment system.  So far her feathers are similar to Paprika's, though her feathers have a bit more red to them:

All of the chicks appear to have fully functioning wings now, and are able to fly up and out short distances.  Of course that leads the hubby to question weather we are raising chickens or baby hawks, especially when they all get going with their squawking.

Aflac is turning into quite the doll baby.  He (yes, I'm still calling the ducks "he" though I still have no clue on the gender) will calm down and allow you to hold him pretty quickly, though he talks right in your ear the entire time.  He's also a big boy - we weighed him yesterday doing the mommy weighs herself with and without duckling method and he's approximately 1.6 pounds.  In contrast, Daffy is only 1.2 pounds.  It is hard to tell in the picture, but his yellow baby fluff is slowly giving way to white feathers:

Daffy remains incredibly skittish, screaming and fighting any time you pick him up.  I will have to do some more research on Swedish Blues to find out if this is a breed thing or simply an issue of needing more socializing.  Still more social than the chickens from a distance - the ducks overall seem to have more curiosity and awareness of our comings and goings than the chicks do.  Daffy has a softer appearance than Aflac still and I haven't noticed the adult feathers coming in yet (though the color difference may have something to do with that):

  

And now to show you the new coop.  After much deliberation we decided on a pre-fabricated one that we picked up at the farm and feed store.  It ended up being cheaper than buying all of the lumber, fencing, and tools that we would have needed to craft our own.  Plus once our city gets to the point where we can openly own poultry we can easily transfer it outside.

The design is fairly simple - coop with attached nesting box with a ramp down into a run.  We did not attach the roof (since the birds are inside we do not need to worry about it blowing off or predators coming in) so we suspended a bar to allow us to hang the heat lamps - one inside the coop for now and another brighter one to illuminate the run.  We also changed out the garage lights for daylight bulbs to increase the brightness.

Another view from the end:

We did buy larger food and water dishes as they are eating and drinking a lot more than when we first brought them home.  There was a natural division of the run, so I have the food and water containers sitting on newspaper on the one side.  My hope is that we won't end up with water dish filled with pine shavings like we did in the tub, and the newspaper will be easy to change out as it gets dirty.  The other side has the pine shavings, giving the birds something to scratch around in and also that will absorb stool and make great compost for the garden.  The coop is lightweight enough that we can easily move it to one side or tilt it up so that we can sweep the litter out when it comes time to do a complete change.

View inside the coop so that you can see the nesting boxes.  We will eventually get some hay to put in those, but it is way cheaper to buy it in the 80 pound bale (about 3 dollars more than the 6 pound bag they sell in the store) and it wouldn't fit in our van with the kids.  So that will be a separate trip this summer when we get closer to the time where we will start seeing eggs.

There are two roosts the coop.  We have a heat lamp in there for now to keep them warm until the weather breaks for good - we will have to see how to adjust that as they grow so no one bonks their head.  Under the roosts is a removable tray that I also lined with newspaper for easy clean-up.

The girls aren't too sure yet about the new home.  When I first put them in they all huddled in the corner like you see here.  Once I put the ducks in they started to relax (picking up on some of the curiosity from them?) and scratched around.  So far I know they know how to go down the ramp, though no one seems to have ventured back up it yet.

I will keep you posted as to how everyone settles in!  We saved the larger tub to make into a bathing tub for the ducks - the plan is that until the pond is built we will put them in there once a day to splash around.