Thieves in the night.

The social structure in our 4, no 5, no 4, well, however many, chicken pens required adjustment. So, as widely recommended, my wife and I tiptoed in after dark to change living quarters of some of the hens. It's very strange; chickens don't see very well at night and don't do much after dusk, so, even though we wake them up and irritate them by picking them up, they really don't raise much of a fuss. Which makes them very easy to move at night.  Easy to catch and easy to put back to bed in a new home. Then, it's our experience that they wake up and figure they are where they are supposed to be.

Our 5 new hens (one of them we now think may be a roo) are smaller, wild types. So we decided to put them in the main pen as a group. Wild Thing was in Junior's pen, but really hanging out by herself - therefore, we moved her with the new group. The other three Marys (Americanas, lay blue eggs) are still breaking brown eggs before they lay theirs in the nest, so I wanted to move them to Junior's pen with the two I had already moved there. And there was a beat-up Angel (white brown egg layer) that was sleeping in a corner by herself that we decided at the last moment needed a change.  We changed 10 chickens, one-by-one, sneaking around the pens in the dark with a flashlight.  Wheee!  And we will get up tomorrow at the crack of dawn to see if they are all getting along!  Fingers crossed!