Now we can clean and dust the basement.  The new chicks have gone out to the big coop today.  As with our meat birds last year we cordoned off the barn and run for them to have their own space.  For about the next week there will be two flocks.  The big girls and roosters will be able to see the newbies and vice versa.  Once they have gotten a little bit bigger then we will take the babies, put them in dog crates and bring them over to the adults.  This is done at night.  When chickens are asleep they become practically comatose.  By introducing new birds at night they will all wake up the next morning and not remember that they were once separated.  There will be about a week or so of rebuilding the pecking order but then all will become what normalized.  While it wasn’t such an inconvenience to have them in the basement through the cold snap, they did start to make the place quite dusty.  They don’t really make very good indoor pets.