Tentative Steps: Pullets Venture Outside

The chicks are 13 weeks old now, officially pullets and cockerels. A few cockerels are crowing. Most sound like teen-age boys, but one sounds like a rooster. We can finally look in the coop and differientiate the pullets and cockerels. Like in the sheep barn, it's been a female year in the chicken house. Of the 20-plus young chicks, only five or six appear to be roosters. This weekend, we decided they were big enough to go outside, that the cat and hawks would hopefully leave them alone. For 13 weeks, these birds have walked on sawdust. A cardboard box, and later, a chicken coop, contained them. Their view of the outside world was through doors screened in chicken wire. Their diet consisted of grain and tomatoes, melons, and other garden scraps. On that first day, they took tentative steps outside. They stayed near the chicken house. When scared, they ran back to it. When I opened the door on the second day, they scurried out, and walked through the yard, searching for bugs, eating weeds, chasing one another. They were ready to take on the world.