A Poultry Soap Opera

After more than a month in isolation, Beemster is getting ornery.  Who can blame him?  Three days in the hospital was more than enough for me.  I can only imagine the monotony of having to spend multiple weeks in a "medical" institution (aka dog crate).

Now that the ice and snow have melted away from the chick house and surrounding run, we relocated Beemster there.

His foot looks better but it is still not entirely healed.  We will have to see how it makes out with a bit more use.

The chick coop does not have a particularly high fence, nor a net covering the top, so we added a broody hen for good measure.  Hopefully she is enough company to keep Beemster from trying to make his way back to the big coop.  Also, maybe he will fertilize her eggs and she can begin sitting on them.  This little hen has been trying to hatch eggs for months now, so this is her chance!

It is a bit like a poultry soap opera: hen helps rooster get back on his feet (literally in this case) and then they raise a beautiful family together.   Or else, Beemster's sore foot gets reinfected and he loses both his leg and the hen!  Or worse - he ends up in the soup pot (not really since we treated him with antibiotics and thus rendered him inedible).  What a cliff hanger.  Be sure to tune in next week to see how it all turns out.