Here chicky chicky chicky

Friends are off to Paris for a month. Their three chickens, however, don't have passports and thus were required to stay home and be cared for by a parade of neighborhood children. They're very tolerant chickens and Sam happily assumed responsibility for a week provided he was guaranteed a minimum of six eggs.

No, I don't know why he needed at least six eggs.

Meet one of the hens. She's cute and tasty looking. I'm sure she has a name but I don't know what it is so I'll call her drumstick.

The daily routine was to feed them (the kids made sure they were VERY fed. There was no way they could have possibly eaten all the food the kids were giving them.), check their water supply and refill if necessary, and collect the eggs.

Sam really enjoyed checking for eggs.

But every day we looked at this. Chicken butt.

Let's name this hen Eggless because that's what she was. I didn't know if it was because she was hot since we had chicken duty over the heat wave here, or if she was broody. She never seemed to leave the nest boxes and she never seemed to lay any eggs. I requested technical assistance from Paris and learned that it very much sounded as though she was broody and one way to deal with that was to keep all the chickens from going into the nesting boxes at all. So, in case you ever need to deal with a broody hen, you now know the procedure - lock them out of their nests.

Sam couldn't leave the chickens without a little game of chase. Poor chickens; check out Sam's expression. The reddish brown hen is named, er, let's call her Cutlet. She and Drumstick were the only two laying and I'm not sure which of them laid this fine specimen.