Who's in the pool?

We have fished a lot of creatures out of our pool - a baby bunny, a bird or two, bugs of all kinds (including a scorpion), and gophers. This afternoon we pulled out a frog* for the first time.

We went out to get in the pool and Hayden said there was a frog in the pool. I asked him how big it was and he said it wasn't too big. Well, I guess he hasn't seen many frogs because it was the BIGGEST frog I had ever seen! The body was at least the size of my hand.

He appeared to be enjoying his swim in the pool. When Jerry first moved the net towards him he swam down towards the bottom. We scooped him up in the net and let him go next to the irrigation pipe in the field across the street. We didn't want him hanging around just in case he was one of the poisonous frog/toads we get around here that can make dogs sick.

As much as we enjoyed his visit, I'm happy to say he hasn't been back!


*Although I say frog he/she may have been a toad. 

Flock Update: One Down

We got our first little white egg from the new chickens a little over a week ago. Friday we got our first little brown egg. I'm not sure if it was one of the Barred Rocks or the Silver Laced Wyandottes as both lay brown eggs.

For some reason pullets seem to go a little crazy right before they start laying. It seems to be a phase (thankfully, it doesn't last long) and has happened with each of our three chicken batches. Maybe it's chicken puberty, I don't know!

One of the Barred Rocks has been trying to sleep on top of the chicken coop. Outside! On the roof! If you have seen our coop, you know the roof is pretty high up for a chicken. Every night we have to go out there and get her down and put her in with the others.

They have also started to jump the fence and we find them out in the main yard or worse in the neighbor's yard. We rigged up a device to try and keep them out of the neighbor's yard. I am still not sure if it's not working or if they are getting over there another way, but we found a few chickens over in the neighbor's yard last week. The kids helped me get them safely back over the fence into our yard.

Yesterday, it happened again and this time we weren't so lucky. The neighbor dog got to one of the Barred Rocks before we could save her. And just like that we are down a chicken. Ugh.

As I was doing my "farm" chores yesterday, I thought to myself… as long as we lost a chicken, at least let it be the one that had been on the roof of the coop every night so we don't have to deal with that anymore. That chicken obviously had a rebellious streak! Sure enough, when I went out to lock up the coop last night the roof was empty.