Remember Fleur, the unfortunate hen I had to perform surgery on a few months ago?

Well, she’s doing great. Not only has she been back to scratching around and clucking about with her friends, she recently went broody (she began to sit on a nest of eggs).

This past week she has hatched three new chicks.  Emily has named them Widget, Butterbeer and Tsukiko.

Fleur is an excellent mama, and has proved herself to be more fierce when it comes to her babies than any previous mama hen we’ve had.  I am guessing her near death experience has something to do with it!

She’s more than ready to attack you if you try to grab those babies.

Fortunately Emily is pretty adept when it comes to chicken management, so we were able to check over all the babies and they are perfect!

Emily is pretty excited about the new babies she gets to care for.

I wasn’t actually planning on hatching out any more babies; the chances of getting more roosters is too high and we have far too many already.  But, I have 50 meat chicks I am currently caring for until they go to freezer camp in August and Emily hasn’t been too happy with me about it.  Having her own little babies to care for has been a nice distraction so she hasn’t been focused on the fate of the other chicks.  And with any luck they will all be hens, and help replenish the population of egg layers that we lost to predation in the spring.  And, since they were hatched out of blue eggs, hopefully they will lay fun – colored eggs as well.