Triffid-esque (Thanks Jothemama)

Now. Those are the biddies today. You see that tiny toy chicken in there? Three days ago, I say three days ago, the peeps were the same size as that toy.
And today, they could eat that toy chick for breakfast. In fact, they inspected it for edibility when I put it in their cage. They decided that no, it was not something worthy of ingesting.
I really am a bit amazed. And a bit, well, disconcerted at how quickly these babies are growing. When I go to check on them, they raise their little heads up and flap their little wings, and they even take short little hop-flights.

Now here's the thing when you get chickens: you don't know if you have roosters or hens. We have six babies and for all we know, they could all be roosters. It's hard to tell until they start getting their combs and wattles and all that roostery adornment. There is a way to sex chickens (and no, that's not what it sounds like, but means to determine the gender of baby chicks and you knew that, right?) but, as Wikipedia says, it's not easy and requires a trained sexer. Here's how it goes:

Vent sexing, also known simply as venting, involves literally squeezing the feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent (called a cloaca) slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump", which would indicate that the chick is a male. Some females have very small bumps, but rarely do they have the large bumps male chicks possess.

Ahem. No. We won't be doing that. We'll wait for the secondary sexual characteristics to show up to make our determinations. Thank-you.

We plan on keeping one rooster and sending the rest back to where they came from (and no, that does not mean we're going to eat them with dumplings but hey! I have chicken breasts in the refrigerator and what the hell is the difference? Just because my children never named those chicken breasts doesn't mean that they weren't as cute as these babies when they were raised in the evil chicken farm) and we're getting half a dozen more in a few weeks so hopefully, we will end up with a least a few hens. Eventually.
The roosters supposedly grow faster than the hens and so far, the smallest chick in the box is a pretty little red thing and the one Mr. Moon admired the most upon meeting them. If she is indeed a hen, I think we will name her Red for the character played by Morgan Freeman in one of our favorite movies, the Shawshank Redemption.

I like red chickens.
I grew up being best friends with a girl from a family who kept Rhode Island Reds and they had a rooster named Khrushchev. That was one bad motherfucker of a chicken. All the kids in the neighborhood were deathly afraid of Khrushchev who would peck your barefeet and ankles bloody if you didn't take care to stay out of his way. And that made him an ideal rooster for their flock because a rooster's job is to protect his women and protect the women, he did.
Still, it was with some glee that this family finally chopped off that bird's head and cooked him up. I think it took days in the stew pot to render him fit to eat but they gladly let him boil.

Well, enough of all that. I am very interested in this whole process and I understand the evolutionary pattern of the chicks growing so fast. They need to in order to survive into adulthood. Same with the way they know exactly what to do about bugs. FIND AND EAT THEM!

It's going to be fun to watch them make their first forays out into the chicken run. They are going to be so happy, running after bugs, pulling up this and that and trying everything for tastiness.

Let me just say this- the day those chickens start to eat my favorite weed nemesis- the Florida Betony- will be a good day in my life.

The circle of life will somehow be complete and it will all make sense and I will understand the secrets of the universe. Or at least the secrets of my universe and mostly, that's all I need to know.
Mostly.