From my vast experience --A Whole Year-- of caring for chickens, I am ready to declare that the chicks are officially grown into pullets. Even the smallest of them is showing more adult feathers than chick fuzz. The largest of them, Shaq, looks ready to graduate to a dinner plate. She/he looks like an air-born inner tube rocking its way around the yard. The skin torn from under Shaq's wing have not grown back. The bone of the uncovered wing joint is ominously dark, but it seems to bother me more than it bothers Shaq.

I am still functionally clueless on how to tell a he from a she, but I am feeling confident that Big Bertha is a she. An elegant "she" of a still un-guessed breed. Purty, purty, purty. She is beginning to hold her own when the old hens come to demand their Rights at the feeder. I expect to find her choosing the roost over the hutch soon. I wonder if she is already choosing to sleep in the hutch out of loyalty to her clutch-mate more than personal comfort.

Little Bertha seems to have full use of the eye and wing which were wounded in the predator attack, but her development is way behind the others. I have been taking her from the hutch in the morning for a daily feather comb. I knew I'd find a respectable use for those silver shrimp forks my mother-in-law passed on to her son if I just held on to them long enough. Only took 30 years. . .

The chickens continue socializing as two separate flocks. The lines between them are thinning, though. Especially this morning. The feeders didn't get filled yesterday. Both flocks are mystified by my tapping on this box when there is food to be served.