Peahens & Peachicks

Zsuzsana and Judit came to us via the Zurich Zoo. Looking at them, it's utterly impossible to tell them apart. Luckily the have different colored anklets. Their personalities, on the other hand, are quite different. Zsuzsana is calm, elegant, careful and respectful. Judit is very, very protective and--one might say--aggressive. She often picks on Lucky--literally, when he isn't looking she will peck his behind.

A week ago both Zsuzsana and Judit's eggs hatched! They both sat on their eggs exactly 28 days. For both of them we had to build or set up fences in order to protect them from predators. Zsuzsana's fence was much more complicated because she chose to set up her nest on the slate cliff side. It's amazing that the chicks didn't roll all the way down the side of the cliff after they hatched.

After hatching, the chicks are spending some weeks in the hay barn with their moms until they're big and old enough to fly into a tree at night. Until then, the mother's will sit on them just as they did when they were just eggs, and this is too dangerous to do so at night outside of the barn.