Humphrey

I like him best when he is sleeping.




We took him out to our friend's farm and let him play with his litter sisters. He sure was pooped afterwards.

They have a rockin' cool chicken coop for their flock o' fifteen (or so)

And I'm totally jealous of their chicken yard. After seeing this I became inspired to rescue my own hens out of their holocaust existence in the muddy, stinky side yard and create a more free-range experience for them. I wanted to put up a fence like this (much smaller of course) and give them about a 1/3 of our back yard to free range.

We used to have them free range over all the back yard and it worked great (except for the occasionally too many piles of chicken poop on the patio -- and once or twice on the bbq, which Paul had a coniption over), until we brought home Humphrey, who promptly began trying to eat the chickens. Thus the quarantine to the side yard.

Paul doesn't like the idea of losing half of his yard to chickens he is trying to pretend we don't have. So I've decided to gussy up the side yard and plant lots of ground cover and bushes that they can play in and forage around. And I'll really make the fence/gate impenetrable to Humphrey getting in. I'll even put a chair out there so that we can sit out there and read and hang out with the chickens so they won't be lonely.



Fences are a good thing with Humphrey around.



We checked out Fluffball while we were there, too. He is loving his life bossing around the hens and crowing to his heart's content.





Humphrey loves knowing what's going on at all times; he looks out this window and barks at all the passing people, cars and strong winds.



Our poor Kiya is five years old and still doesn't quite know what to make of seven month old Humphrey. Sometimes she plays with him, but lots of times she ignores him and pretends to be sleeping while he bites her head.



He gets into everything. I had to throw away this blanket because I discovered a huge -- almost Robert sized -- hole in the middle of it. Courtesy of Humphrey tugging on it, I assume.



Of course the children encourage him and continue to play tug games with inappropriate objects. By the way, I am not taking this picture, thereby consenting to this behavior.






Humphrey's such a punk. That's all there is to it.



He follows Kiya around like an annoying little brother.




We try to give Kiya some extra lovin' to make up for this horrible intrusion in her life ...



but he's not all bad. He is pretty charming when he's horizontal and not bounding up four feet in the air because you are bringing his food to the back door.