April 24 EASTER SUNDAY!

How lucky am I to have a bunny AND baby chicks on Easter! My girls were chirping and happy this morning.  They seemed more active and interested in their surroundings.  It became apparent that the office was not the best place to keep my little brood.  Sammy and Rowdy my 7 month old kittens showed a morbid interest in their new family members and kept trying to paw their way under the door.  Jim had the great idea of putting the babies in Buster’s old bunny cage.  It’s a secure environment where the kittens can watch the chicks but not get to them.  We set up the bunny/chick cage on the back porch where Buster, Missy & Boots (our two old lady cats) and Rowdy and Sam could all have their own little HDTV version of Animal Planet. 

 The kittens were recently declawed but not before they both developed a taste for birdflesh in our back yard.  Rowdy thinks that Daisy is full of yummy cream filling. 

She just wants a TASTE!  All the books say that eventually the cats will realize that the chickens are family members, not food.  After they grow into teenage chicks the cats should not be a threat.  We’ll keep a very close watch on the crew until we’re sure that the felines won’t massacre the little peckers.  Buster shows little interest.  He thinks they smell funny.  He’s a vegetarian so he doesn’t see them as appetizers at all.   I read that even as small as one week, they like to perch on things, so Jim made a little perch out of a piece of wood left over from a project.  He sanded the edges so their little toes could grasp it easily.  They don’t really understand what it is but they keep staring at it.  I read that holding them often makes them tamer so I spend lots of time picking them up and walking around the house with a chick in my hands.  They don’t seem to mind and they even get a little calm after a while.  I have to clean the water trough often because they kick shavings into it and sometimes they even poop in it.  Yikes!  I’m supposed to clean out their cage and put in fresh shavings once a week but I think I may have to do it more often than that.  They are little poop factories.  Eventually I’m going to devise a system to collect their droppings to compost for fertilizer.  One thing a time…