Cluck, Cluck, Chuck, Duck.

 The chook pen landed early Thursday morning.  Our wonderful island delivery man lugged it into the side yard for me where it was easiest for me to dismantle the packages & start the assembly process.  Everything was much lighter to handle than I was expecting & on cue, Chile Girl arrived, still in her PJs & quite unable to resist the temptation of putting it all together.

The first panels went together easily.  Unfortunately one piece of perspex is missing from a window  & the MOTH is still negotiating with the seller to have it replaced. It needs to be done for safety reasons, snakes being way too clever & with an unholy love of fresh eggs!

The assembly process was quite quick.  Everything is preassembled, lightweight & factory made to all fit together.  I am visual & Libby is hands on so between us we had the best of all possible worlds as I could *see* what needed doing & she had no trouble with the doing!  We did need the MOTH  for one or two things & we do have one minor hiccup requiring the roof to come back off so we can string the coop door string through so we can actually open & shut the door. Other than that I am pretty happy with it.

The only other thing is this particular pen didn't come with a wire floor but as that is easily rectified we aren't overly stressed & will just pick up the necessary wire on Monday.  Once that is done  I will purchase the cane mulch as we will do a deep mulch pen & the food & work out where we want the feeder & water dishes.  I haven't really decided what to do about the water.  Chooks need rather a lot of it but are notorious for knocking it over, pooping in it, scrabbling mulch into it & otherwise turning fresh clean water into something very nasty indeed. I have considered a hanging water feeder but there are 2 strikes against this: firstly I don't think there is anywhere really suitable to hang one  & secondly they are prone to green algae & hard to clean! For the present it will be dishes with pebbles in the bottom to make them that much harder to tip over.

My Dilly is also very interested in my as yet non~existent chickens.  Like me, she knows her son will be very interested when he visits.  I have lined ODD up to pick up these birds ~ partly because ODD has always loved her chickens, partly because she has named her own special one already: Nugget, as in Chicken Nugget.  As the girl is vegetarian I can only wonder where her mind goes!  Hopefully another fortnight will see us happily clucking about our brand new chooks.