Chicken Boredom

In this weather, the chickens have to spend a lot of time in the coop.  Usually, they are free to go out into the yard all day, but since the chicken door is iced shut, (and they don't like snow or ice anyway), the chickens have all been kept inside for the last couple of days.  They are still laying about a dozen eggs a day, though, and they are doing pretty good overall.  However, when chickens get bored, they can do bad things like peck at each other or eat eggs, so I wanted to do something to keep them from getting bored.

So we made chicken cake.

Lydia and Elijah helped me mix and bake two chicken "cakes" today.  I got a recipe for a chicken "boredom-buster" brick from the Prairie Homestead blog (http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/), and I'd told Lydia a long time ago that we'd make a special cake for the chickens sometime this winter.  Well, with the kids home from school again today, today became the day.  I delivered the two cakes (one mostly whole, the other broken into many pieces)  to the coop a couple of hours ago.  The chickens approached the pieces with curiosity at first, but soon they were all busy eating.  Maybe it will keep them occupied for a little while, anyway.