The Girls were having a lo of arguments at bed time last night.
They currently have two coops to choose from. Each coop can comfortably accommodate 10 girls. Last night, there was a lot of fighting and squawking going on. with girld running fdown the ladder , and round in tot he other coop. Then more squawking and someone else pinging out of that coop and going in to the first.
There are only 8 of them, and I think 6 of them swapped beds at least once. Some of them swaapped coops multiple times.
Unusually, no one opted to sleep out on the mezzanine (a platform we built at the height of the top of the ladder) nor in the run (tin the summer, some of the girls opt to sleep on the many perches in the run).
Mentioning the mezzanine reminded me of Lotti, our Exchequer Leghorn hen. She was best friends with Poppy (my current oldest girl at 10+). She was a loopy,, lovely girl. She had deformed claws on one foot, and found it difficult to gain access to the coop at night. The Establishment liked to assert their authority by refusing to let the younger girls in the coop at night, so the youngsters had to hang around on the ladder and bolt in when they got a chance. It was awkward for Lotti to do this, so we built a mezzanine level for her to use. She died (along with everyone except Poppy) when we had a fox attack, April 2015. The awfulness of it makes my eyes leak a little, even now.
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I'm not surprised the Gikrs ae cranky. All are moulting, and different parts of them are at different stages. Most of them have at elast one part of the body with the new shafts sticking out, but the feathers haven't popped out yet. These are really uncomfrotable for the, and are painful if they get knocked or pocked or pulled.
I can imagine that someone gets accidentally knocked, they shriek and move away and accidentally bump into someone else. And then it goes on like a mexican wave of accidental biffing. Ad din the inevitable bad tempered retailiations, and it's not surprising that we had last nights shenanigans.
