I discovered another skin of a soft shelled egg yesterday. I still don't think it was Mildred, although it could be. Today she was acting like she was looking for a place to lay an egg, complete with the same clucking sound we heard when she laid the egg in the woodpile. In fact, she was haunting the woodpile again this morning while making those sounds, and the goat pen, and she stuck her head in the bucket nest box, but I don't think she likes it. I think it's still too small for her. So my next project is a trip to WalMart to get a good sized plastic storage box for conversion.

Yesterday I doubled the size of the area the chicks have to run around in. I brought a monitor box home from work, taped it up, cut a hole in for a perch and another for observation (covered by chicken wire). The existing computer box nests into it and I cut a hole in the old box so they could get into the new area. They ignored it until I put that end under the heat lamp. Now they have to walk away into the old end for food and water. They seem to like the new digs now, but they haven't yet gotten the hang of using the perch. They seem to use it more for games of king of the hill, body slamming one another off of it.

Some of the chicks have wing feathers coming in, especially the Rhodies. Looking at them this weekend, I'm speculating that we have two males and a female. At ten days, the male suspects have more red in their beak, and it looks like their combs are developing bigger and faster than the third. I'll have to research RIR's to find out if this is the case. I was talking to someone today who kept chickens, and he said that straight runs tend to give more males than females. He also said that what I described sounds like the case for the Rhodies.

Time will tell. Or maybe the Internet will tell first.