The Chicken of New Year’s Eve
This is Po. Guess what was written on his eggshell? Though why you would need to note the egg was a poland when it seemed polands were all the seller kept, I do not know.
Looking at his beautiful round crest, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s a hen. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, all my birds were misidentified as hens at this age and I breathed a sigh of relief.
He later developed the spikey ‘potted palm’ hairdo and the male saddle and sickle feathers. His color is called white-crested cuckoo. Yes, his crest went white.
The smallest of my boys, he has a thin and squeaky crow but makes an astonishing range of quiet verbalizations as he pecks around the garden. Squeaks. Trills. A funny sort of clicking or purring. I do wonder what he’s trying to say.
Welp, here we are at the ass-end of 2019 and I don’t really know what to say about it. Some bad things happened, but we are solvent and well and I’m afraid to complain for as long as those two things are true.
Best wishes for the preposterously named ‘2020’ and we’ll see you on the other side of the fireworks!
December 31, 2019 — 6:40 pm
Comments: 15
Monday’s chook is full of woe…
This is Rackets, the first of the boys. You can see his crest is just starting to get loosey (when mature, the girls have afros and the boys look like potted palms). Not long after this picture was taken, I found him unresponsive in the grass and he died an hour or so later. No idea why. Very sad.
One lady on the chicken forums said she gave up on polands because they always reached two months old and fell over dead. I suppose I should be grateful it was only the one.
He was chamois colored, like Chel — the only color to repeat — but there wasn’t anything written on his shell, so I named him after Nick Rekieta.
If you don’t know the name, Nick Rekieta is a small-town lawyer with a YouTube channel. He occasionally does short explainers (here’s a good one on impeachment), but his stock in trade is live streams that go on for hours while he drinks whisky and reads lawsuits line by line. It’s surprisingly interesting.
It takes twenty-one days for a chicken egg to develop and hatch, and the incubator sat on my desk the whole time listening to Rekieta (AKA Rackets). When little Rackets hatched, it looked for all the world like he was trying to follow the sound.
Which…I dunno…could be. They learn in the shell, and mother talks to them when hatching time is near. I’d like to think he imprinted on Racket’s voice.
I’d also prefer he hadn’t died.
December 30, 2019 — 8:22 pm
Comments: 7
Happy 27th, which has no significance at all
Another pretty girl. She had “ch” written on her shell which, I correctly guessed, stands for chamois. So her name is Chel (like the Portal character; I’ve always assumed that’s short for Michelle).
To answer the question I’m sure you’ve asked by now, no. They don’t see very well at all. When they panic (which is often) they zoom around and bump into things. The pekins take terrible advantage of them.
I honestly can’t tell if they’re crazy and stupid or just blind.
I tried trimming their crests around their eyes, which helped a little. But it takes patience and a long time holding a chicken on your lap waiting for an opportunity (they hate having their crests touched), which I have not been willing to do in December rain.
Yes, it’s still raining. Yes, I’m going mental. It was glorious and sunny on Christmas Day and only on Christmas Day (a true xmas miracle) but it’s gone right back to shit ‘n’ chips.
These are pictures from Summer. There is nothing sadder and more hang-dog than a wet poland.
December 27, 2019 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 18
Happy Boxing Day!
Our Christmas was lovely. Our Christmas dinner exceptionally nice. We mostly gave each other things to keep warm, like nice socks, and we were happy with that. We R old.
So, anyhoo — TADA! I finally got those poland bantams I’ve always wanted. I had to make ’em myself. I bought an incubator and six hatching eggs off Ebay. Everyone reassured me they wouldn’t all hatch.
Spoiler: they all hatched.
The problem with polands is that you can’t tell the males and females apart until they’re at least two months old. In fact, I posted pictures of mine at eight weeks to a chicken forum and several experienced poland keepers told me they were all female.
Spoiler: they weren’t.
Some of the eggs had a scrawl on the bottom to indicate what they were, so I named them based on that. The is G at eight weeks old. She’s a Golden laced poland bantam.
And she’s a very pretty girl, too, but frutty as a nootcake.
December 26, 2019 — 6:20 pm
Comments: 18
I’m dreaming of a white chicken…
Baby Sam wishes you the merriest of Christmases!
December 25, 2019 — 12:00 pm
Comments: 11
On the Second Day of Chickmas
And here they are, all growed up, in the same order. This is obviously before Moe decided Sam Had To Die. The boys all have to be separated now.
My chickens are a disappointment in black and white. They really are very pretty birds.
Is errbody ready for Christmas?
December 24, 2019 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 13
On the First Day of Chickmas…
As I plan to avoid anything that even remotely requires thinking or work for the next two weeks, I figured I’d give myself an easy out and post about my flock. I haven’t kept you up to date on my chooks because I thought for a while I was going to do a whole website about them, then I remembered I’m lazy and I hate to make websites.
These are my oldest three, a day or two after hatching in July of 2018. I had a hen go hard broody (that’s her), so I bought six ‘fertile’ eggs for her. She sat on them for a month and they were all duds. She was so forlorn, I couldn’t bear it.
So I got four more from someone I trusted, and two hatched. I went back to the lady and bought two chicks from the same batch. (That’s four total, but one vanished from the coop one morning. Probably eaten by bears). I got her to accept the new ones as hers.
Twelve eggs, net result: two roosters and one hen.
In order, that’s Millie, Moe and Sam. They’re Pekin bantams, like all my previous chooks. You know, with the feathery feet.
December 23, 2019 — 8:07 pm
Comments: 5
Muh boys
These are my two pekin cockerels. The one on the left is Mo, the one on the right is Sam (hatched on the Fourth of July). Sam is the dominant boy and king of the garden.
They’ve been raised together from hatch. They’re about eighteen months old now. They scrap and belly-bump a little, but nothing serious. I’m short of chicken runs, but luckily I’ve been able to house them together.
Until two weeks ago. The day Mo decided Sam had to die.
I didn’t know this. I came out to put them away and bossman Sam was missing. I called and called and he finally he slunk out of some hidey hole the saddest, muddiest, bloodiest rooster you ever saw.
Nothing serious. Comb and wattle injuries bleed like a bastard and he was pecked up good. I brought him in the house and gave him a warm bath in a bucket and put him in chicken hospital (a dog crate full of straw) until he’d dried out and recovered a little.
Now I spend the short afternoons making sure every boy gets some time to run free in the garden. Except they don’t; the free cockerel spends all his time trying to murder the captive one through the bars.
I have FOUR boys. Never again from the incubator!
December 12, 2019 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 22
Word of the day: yaffle
Uncle B saw one of these in the garden today. It is a European Green Woodpecker. Not his picture, though — the little peckerhead moved too fast.
I had a poke around the web, which informed me that the green woodpecker’s call is a liquid laughing yaffle.
Liquid laughing yaffle. Well, I never.
Only one document added ‘liquid’ to the mix, but they pretty much all say laughing yaffle. You might be forgiven for thinking ‘yaffle’ is a general term for a kind of sound, but no. It’s specific to the green woodpecker, which is also called a ‘yaffle’.
Pity. It seemed such a promising word.
You can make up your mind whether this sounds like a laughing yaffle to you. I’m torn.
Which brings us to Woody, who was not modelled after a European green woodpecker, but a pileated woodpecker, which also has a laughing call. The deep lore of Wikipedia tells me that the inspiration was an acorn woodpecker that pecked holes in Walter Lantz’s honeymoon cabin. He wanted to shoot it, but his wife suggested he make a cartoon about it instead. It became his most famous character.
Why don’t my life ass-aches ever turn into award-winning triumphs?
Aforementioned wife, Carol Stafford, became the fifth and final voice of Woody Woodpecker, though she asked not to be credited for some years. She thought kids wouldn’t like it if Woody was voiced by a girl. (I thought she was also the voice of Talky Tina, but I was wrong. That was June Foray, who also played Rocky the Squirrel).
And that’s it. Man, I hated Woody Woodpecker.
September 9, 2019 — 8:08 pm
Comments: 13
Mindin’ my own damn business
Near miss with a mad old bird over the weekend. I’m walking in the field next door, and I hear this hissing. I reckon I was a feather away from a swan attack. Those emeffers can peck. And also fly.
I wonder if it has babies.
Took a walk in the field on the other side today. Way down at the end, there’s an abandoned orchard. I nicked a bucket of apples and a bucket of damsons. I had the owner’s permission, though, so that kind of took the fun out of it.
And that’s all I got. Been an irritating sort of day, really. Other than the apples.
August 28, 2019 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 7