Chick Photo Shoot and Food Menu

Did I take my baby chicks out into the cool morning air so I could pose them with flowers?  Yes I did, and yes I realize that I'm becoming a total chicken dweeb.   But aren't they adorable?  They look adorable in their card board box too, but outside the sunlight really brings out the cuteness factor.  The chick in the photo above is the one I call Beardy; she's the biggest of the four and the bossiest.    She likes to step into the food bowl, scratch violently with her feet, step backwards out of the bowl and then take a bite.  Then she does the step forward, scratch and kick, step backward, then bite dance over, and over again.  It's ridiculous and makes a mess, but she loves it.  Notice that she already has wings, after just one week. 

This is Curly, who no longer has bad hair days.  He is the runt who came out of the shell nearly two days after Beardy.  Notice that he does not have wings yet.  He's still a fluffy fluff ball. 

When I first brought the chicks home from the office incubator, I didn't have any chick food so I put some oatmeal and some Heritage O's cereal (fancy Cherie O's) in the food processor and ground them into small bits and fed them to the chicks.  The Heritage O's are made of oats, wheat, spelt, barley, quinoa, and millet flours with some cane juice.  They taste okay, but they are so hard and crunchy I feel like I could break a tooth, so we still have a big bag of them.  The chicks like it just fine.  Joe was concerned that they weren't getting enough protein, so I started feeding them cut up bits of boiled eggs, which they love and which I have in abundance from Helen and Mrs. Hall.  Now I also give them vegetable and fruit pulp from my juicer.  I had intentions of buying some chick food from Tractor Supply as soon as I had a chance, but I've decided to keep feeding them the oat meal, cereal, egg, and veg pulp menu because this diet doesn't make their box stink.  Every other time I have had baby chicks in the house I had to change the bedding nearly every day to keep them from smelling.  Now I realize that chick poo doesn't stink, it's packaged chick food poo that stinks.  So these chicks are extra cute since they don't live in a smelly box.