The mirror
Oh, they know what they’re looking at. I mean, they couldn’t describe it to you in words of one syllable, but they are both intrigued and unafraid.
Rosie and Jenny as six-week-old mille fleur bantams. Rosie vanished one day, presumably taken by the fox. I heard a bark, but the other chickens didn’t react, so it was a sneaky one.
Jenny grew up to be a wonderful great fat mille fleur archetype and the mother of Sam, Mo and Millie. Not their biological mother, but she sat the eggs and raised them.
An even sneakier fox got her. He head-butted his way into the nest box and ate her right off the perch. I ran out to find him trapped in the chicken run. I opted to let him go to save the other chicken trapped inside.
What was I going to do, beat him to death with a banjo?
December 30, 2021 — 7:59 pm
Comments: 9
But what does it mean?
There’s something about images with multiple chickens that seems to have a deeper meaning. Like a poultry I Ching.
After the divine Lucia (pbuh) fell off the perch at the untimely age of three, these three chooks were my whole flock for a long time. In the evening, when I went to shut them in, I’d open the door and look them over on the perch.
They were facing toward or away from me in one of the following sequences:
beak-beak-butt
beak-butt-butt
beak-butt-beak
butt-beak-butt
butt-butt-beak
beak-beak-beak
butt-butt-butt
I feel sure if I were wise enough, I could tell my fortune by this. The only constant was, everyone slept scooched away from Violence. She was a sleep-pecker.
December 29, 2021 — 6:29 pm
Comments: 6
Charlotte’s best friend
That’s a poorly cast cement kitty sculpture we call Mr Grumpy Puss. It’s such a crude representation, I was astonished when my old cat Charlotte reacted to his appearance in the garden as if he were a real cat.
Charlotte hated other cats and was deeply suspicious of this one at first. After a few days, though, she would sometimes see her sitting on the lawn with him, keeping him company. From a safe distance, of course.
Interesting things go on in the little brains of cats.
Chickens, not so much. The flock have never reacted to him at all, other than to perch on his head and shit down his back from time to time.
That chicken is Violence. She was originally called Violet until we learned her true nature. All the lavender pekins I’ve had were jerks.
December 28, 2021 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 10
A four-pack of greedy beaks
Here we see the chicken’s natural love of spaghetti. I think they think it’s worms.
This right here is illegal in the UK, by the way. Feeding people food to chickens, even pet chickens. This picture was taken in 2013, before the decree, though. Please not to be arresting me.
So, we have a Dead Pool winner already! Congrats, armybrat. Did you notice, by the way, that we had a pandemic and it didn’t affect the frequency Dead Pool winners at all?
December 27, 2021 — 4:31 pm
Comments: 9
Luciaaaaa, I’ll never stop saying Lucia
Sung to the tune of “Maria” naturally.
Lucia was a shy bird when she was little, but all that changed when she hit puberty. And how. She grew into a regal and imperious bird.
I watched Uncle B try to shoo her off the pea patch once. She reared up and looked down her beak at him as if to say, “young man, do you know I who am?”
All the mille fleurs I’ve have been blowsy and bossy. If I had to stick to one type of chicken, it would be a mille fleur pekin bantam.
Funny, I have very few decent pictures of her. She’s always out of focus or behind another bird or walking away from the camera. I think she was too awesome to capture on film.
By the way, they remake of West Side Story was released and I heard it was surprisingly good. I heard that from some randoes on Twitter, though.
I’m assuming the plural of “rando” is “randoes”.
December 22, 2021 — 8:08 pm
Comments: 5
The village geese
Sorry I’m late. We ran into traffic.
Psych! I’m late because I fell asleep in my chair. But we were delayed getting home today because of this flock of village geese. They apparently round out their day having a drink and a splash out of the potholes in this access road.
By the time we got back, my daytime free-ranging cockerel was snoozing in a tree and had to be plucked to safety. He’s even dumber when he’s sleepy.
Tomorrow! 6 WBT! Dead Pool Round 147!
Be here or be at home soaking your cranky chicken in a bucket of warm soapy water!
December 9, 2021 — 8:42 pm
Comments: 3
Does she look happy to you?
A discussion of “mad as a wet hen” appears in the previous thread, so I had to dig out a picture. This is Mapp chicken in 2012, wet. I don’t know about mad, but she ain’t happy.
My lot *will* go out in the rain (especially the Polands) and get thoroughly soaked. Anything is better than being cooped up. But chickens famously will drown if they fall into water and scoot if water is sprayed at them (handy for hostile cockerels).
In fact, I’ve heard more than once that a chicken that falls into water will die even if it’s rescued in time. I don’t know if that’s an old chicken-keeper’s tale.
You can, however, wash a chicken in warm soapy water and give it a blow dry. People do it before shows. Then they put Vaseline on their combs and wattles to make ’em specially red and on their legs to make them…shiny, I guess.
Chicken keepers, eh?
Mapp here is not preparing for a show. Mapp was the tragic victim of a novice chicken keeper: me. Her first Summer as an adult, she abruptly stopped laying and sat on the nest all day looking miserable.
Turns out, she was just broody. Broody hens stop laying eggs. She went broody every Summer for the rest of her damn life (and she lived to be eight, which is good going for a bantam). I didn’t get many omelettes out of this old girl.
But I decided, in my ignorance, that she must be egg bound. Getting an egg stuck in your egg chute can be fatal, so I did panicky things like soak her in a bucket of warm soapy water for an hour, to no avail.
I don’t even want to talk about what I did with the olive oil.
December 8, 2021 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 10
Besties
We went to see my friend with the pet turkey today. This is her with her best friend, a rescue hen. They cuddle. (D’awwww). They’re largely inside pets now.
Yes. I asked. They just wipe it up. Bit of a hippie, this one.
She had a whole flock of rescue chooks at one time, but the fox got most of them. This girl was spared because the other chickens didn’t like her so she was asleep on the porch by herself when tragedy struck.
There’s some kind of life lesson there, but I can’t work it out.
Miz Turkey was amazingly vocal this time. It wasn’t gobbles, either. It was little whistly sounds. She was trying so hard to talk. Then she walked over and got a big beakful of my upper arm and gave it a good shake.
Ah. Hungry.
The lady would maybe like to take one of my four cockerels and I’m tempted, but they do seem to have an awful lot of accidents re: fox. I’d have to live with the fact I sent my boy into the danger zone. Also, these two are so sweet together, I wonder if a loud-ass rooster is really wanted in the mix.
I’ll have a think. Good weekend, everyone!
August 27, 2021 — 7:24 pm
Comments: 5
And at the other end…
Check out Albert’s spurs. This is the weapon roosters use to kill each other in the ring, though they are sometimes equipped with wicked metal cockspurs to increase the damage.
He can do plenty of damage without. The tactic is to leap in the air and come down spur first on your opponent’s vulnerable bits. Shins, in my case. He can actually poke bleeding holes in my flesh right through jeans (somehow, mysteriously, without poking holes in the jeans themselves). If he catches a joint, he can cripple me for a day.
Two of my other boys also try this gambit, but they’re such fuzzy lightweights it’s merely amusing.
That leaves the blessed Mo, who has never been aggressive. The girls love him and he leads them all around the garden. Wot a rooster is Mo!
I never go out there now without a walking stick that I keep between Albert and me at all times. He almost never gets past my guard now.
God, aren’t Poland legs ugly?
Good weekend, everyone!
August 20, 2021 — 7:29 pm
Comments: 11
My chicken is purple
I don’t know if the Ivermectin is helping Albert or not, but I noticed a couple of days ago that the bald spot was bleeding. Chickens will do that. Even though he’s a strapping big brute, it’s not out of the ordinary for a fellow chicken to sneak up behind him and have an experimental peck on an odd patch of skin.
And once blood is drawn…chickens are absolute piranha with a bleeding chicken. That’s when chicken keepers pull out what we call ‘purple anti-pecking spray’. I bet you’ve guessed what that is already.
Gentian violet.
It acts as a disinfectant and the purple color isn’t nearly as attractive to chickens. Holy hell it goes everywhere, though. And, of course, indelibly stains anything it touches.
When I was a kid, it was seen as a last-ditch treatment for poison ivy. My brother, who was terribly terribly allergic, spent most of his Summers with purple legs.
When my mother was in nursing school, one of the med students was getting married. They chased him down, stripped him and barber-striped his penis. (His fellow male med students, not the nurses).
If that story is apocryphal and every med student knows it, please don’t tell me. I like it too much.
Oh. Right. Purple chicken. Sorry for focus. Albert is never still.
August 19, 2021 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 13