Tomorrow is Groundhog Day when, as the story goes, a groundhog ventures from his burrow to foretell the end of winter. Today was 60 degrees, so it’s a little hard to believe we’re even in winter. The bees emerged from their hives, searching for every possible food source. They visited the bird feeders and at [...]
Archive for the ‘Chickens’ Category
Presaging spring
Posted in Chickens on February 1, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Chickens and politics
Posted in Chickens on January 24, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
The chickens ended their four-day sit-in. They must have seen from their windows that the snow was gone, because the second I opened their sliding door, they raced out…and have spent the day happily pecking in the mud. Our lovely snow was short-lived. Yesterday it got so warm that by nightfall a thick fog moved [...]
Tenacity
Posted in Chickens on January 20, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
It snowed again last night, and today was beautiful. Unlike Tuesday, it stayed cold enough to keep the snow from melting. The chickens didn’t like this snow any better. Just as they’d done earlier in the week, they stopped short on their ramp, looked around, and beat a retreat inside, complaining loudly. We refilled their [...]
Another cache
Posted in Chickens on January 19, 2012 | 2 Comments »
When the chickens were released this morning, most ran or flew to the birdfeeder—their first stop every morning. All but our wandering Dominique, Maria, who walked briskly and purposefully away from the others. She’s the chicken who stayed out all night on two occasions, and who laid her eggs in a rock wall for a [...]
Chicken protest
Posted in Chickens on January 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
The chickens refused to go out today. The little door that releases them to the outside pen is opened from inside the coop; you can watch it (and the chickens leaving the coop) through a full-sized door, which is covered by wire mesh. When I opened their door this morning, the chickens stepped onto the [...]
Winter comes to New England, slowly
Posted in Chickens, Garden on January 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Despite the Halloween snowstorm, this winter has been pretty mild. Not so this morning; our thermometer read 6 degrees at 8 a.m., and by 2 p.m. it had climbed only to 13. Even Koa, who lies on the kitchen steps regardless of temperature, decided it was too cold for her. Rebecca, seeing the sunshine, repeatedly [...]
Chickens can and can’t
Posted in Chickens on January 12, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Every December, alumni from RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) sell their handcrafted wares at a holiday fair. My sister and I love to go, and we usually find many treasures—for ourselves as well as the people on our lists. One year we discovered an artist, Sam Ackerman, who’d written an incredibly funny cartoon book [...]
There’s a rooster in my garden
Posted in Chickens on November 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Any time we are in the kitchen and see a chicken run by, we laugh. Even funnier is when Koa sits on the kitchen steps and studiously ignores the chicken running past her. They cover a lot of ground during the day, but of late they’ve spent quite a bit of time in my flower [...]
Chicken helpers
Posted in Chickens on November 25, 2011 | 1 Comment »
The coop is quite spacious for nine chickens, and ours have more room than a lot of small farm flocks. Everything is relative of course, and because they go outside almost every day, and have a huge area in which to roam, the chickens complain loudly when they are “cooped up.” As I approached their [...]
Egg hunt
Posted in Chickens on November 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve said it before; chickens are highly suggestible. On most days we can’t retrieve the eggs until early afternoon because one chicken after another is settled into the nesting boxes. Yesterday we only collected three eggs. This morning all of the chickens went out right away—none stayed in the boxes, and there were no eggs. A bit [...]