For my birthday, I bought myself two new chickens - two 4-month old Black Sexlinks.  They have an iridescent green sheen to their feathers, and will be beautiful once I get them fattened up like my Wyandottes!.  That is assuming I actually can keep them.  I trimmed up one wing on each when I first put them in their pen (separated from my older Wyandottes, now known as Goldie and Silver, until they get used to each other) as they were showing off their flight abilities immediately.  Trimming one wing is supposed to offset their balance so they can't fly.  Whew!  One issue solved before it could cause a problem, right?  Not so much.  That night, I asked AJ if he could lock the older hens up in their house for me, and he came back saying he needed some help - both of the newbies had flown away.

If anyone had a video of this, I would gladly pay any blackmail they asked to keep it off of social media!  Margene and I snuck into my neighbors side-yard looking for the chickens.  The neighbor has a gate to the side yard (completely fenced off from the rest of the yard) that they hadn't locked, so we snuck in and found one chicken.  It was just getting dark at this time, so it wasn't impossible to see a black chicken hiding in the bushes, yet.  As a side note - Margene has never held a chicken, and was terrified to pick one up, so when she found it, I had to come catch it.  We couldn't see the other chicken, so at 8:30, we were ringing the neighbor's doorbell to see if we could prowl around in their backyard to look for a missing chicken.  Now tell me - if someone rang your doorbell after dark asking if they could "look for a chicken", would you let them in???  I have met most of my neighbors enough to wave at them when I see them, but Ralph was the one that knew them all and talked with them (in my defense, I was working and he was retired!) so I "sort of" know my neighbors.  I didn't know if they would recognize me, but they were very gracious and let me prowl around their huge backyard (we have 1/2 acre lots - that's a lot of room for a small black chicken to hide in.)  No luck in finding the chicken though.  Not knowing where it flew to, and knowing that chickens will hide at night, made finding a black chicken especially tough.  We gave up around 9:00 and called it a night, hoping that if someone did find a chicken, they would post it on the NextDoor app.  When it got light enough the next morning, I went outside to check, and she was running around the outside of the pen, trying to get back with the others.  I then trimmed both wings....

Thursday night, they both flew away again.  It wasn't as dark yet, so we were once again sneaking into the neighbor's yard to grab a chicken....sigh..... I changed how I had their pen set up, and locked them both up BEFORE it got dark last night.  So far, so good....Teen-aged chickens are the worst!!!