Two chicks (as in baby chickens) mysteriously found their way into our backyard today. It's really weird  because although we do have chickens roaming around at home, the chickens are all male. So where those two chicks came from is really a mystery.

I'm actually used to having 'farm animals' at home because we've always had them since I was a kid. See, my father's family has a farm and he feels a sort of attachment to farm animals. We actually had turkeys, ducks, goats and sheep once (but not all at the same time), but chickens are as staple as dogs to us, and they roam around as freely as our dogs (much to my father's delight and my mother's annoyance because they destroy her garden plants).

It actually isn't the first time that we're going to raise week-old chicks. When my sister was five, she saw a vendor peddling those colored-chicks (like Buddy Feps' Consuelo) and convinced my mom to buy her three chicks, which she named Alexander, Whitey and Jude respectively. We took care of the chicks - we housed them in our old bird cage (which used to contain four lovebirds I set free in the name of humanitarianism), gave them ground corn to eat and set them free once a day so they can roam around and exercise. At night we'd get the portable fluorescent bulb from my dad's shop and put it in their cage so they wouldn't get cold.

Alexander, Whitey and Jude all turned out to be male White Leghorns, and even though they looked all the same to me, my sister knew who was who. When they were too big for the cage we set them free in the backyard. They were already very tame then, so they really didn't give us a problem. The loved my sister a lot and they would come around and follow her every time she went out. Mind you, they all died of old age because we loved them too much to even consider eating them.

There was also that time when a friend of my dad's gave him a dozen 45 Days chicks as a gift for his coming birthday, saying he could cook them later. We raised those chicks the same way we raised Alexander, Whitey and Jude, but we didn't name them because when you have identical white chickens, names are pointless. When the week of my dad's birthday came my mom asked if he wanted the chickens slaughtered for meat, but my dad looked at her like she was crazy. He said that his day wasn't complete without seeing those twelve chickens roaming around. Those twelve nameless chickens also died natural deaths.

We haven't named the chicks yet because they're so young that we can't even tell if they're male or female, but I have a hunch that both are male. One has darker tufts than the other, (though based on experience, the color of the tufts doesn't necessarily indicate the color of the feathers later) but because we found the chicks together I'm assuming that they're brothers. So I'm thinking about naming them Sam and Dean from Supernatural, or Alan and Charlie from Two and a Half Men, or Carl and Thomas from Zoids, or Terrorblade and Magina from Dota, or Pau and Marc (Gasol! ^_^) from NBA, or even Vegeta and Tarble from Dragon Ball.

See, I like brothers. And chickens. ^_^