Hope learns to fly

One day, while I was outside enjoying observing the two in action, I noticed a flutter of feathers out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look and found that Hope had flown about two feet off the ground into one of our lavender bushes.  She sat their in the middle of the bush finding her footing and eventually settling down.  It was late afternoon and I could tell that this was Hope's way of saying "this is where I want to roost for the night."  It was not a happy ending when I had to carefully lift her out of her new found roost and put her into the coop for the night. 

This behaviour was repeated everyday late in the afternoon/early evening, just before it was "bed time".  I would watch Hope and actually see her up and around at the bushes that surrounded her trying to figure out where and how she was going to jump up into one of them.  She would actually, like an athlete, prepare to launch herself in the direction of a bush, but would most of the time abort the mission not feeling confident enough.  I noticed this behaviour once I have put her in the coop as well, as if she was going to try and fly out of the coop, even though it was impossible.  I felt bad for her, but had to put my foot down because it would not be safe for her to sleep outside.

I'll never forget just kneeling next to her while she was relaxing in the bush, her eyes lazily falling shut.  It was so nice to see her so content.

The plan is to sort the coop out soon so that we have proper nesting boxes and a proper roosting bar so that the girls are more comfortable with being in the coop at night (I think the current make-shift tyre nesting boxes are too low off the ground for them and I also did not have a roosting bar set up yet because I didn't think they would be ready so quickly!).