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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Chickens’ Category
There’s a rooster in my garden
Posted in Chickens on November 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
More on chickens
Posted in Chickens on November 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Cherisse has been splitting wood almost every day now, trying to get a stockpile for our stove. One of the Rhode Island Reds spent all day yesterday helping. As Cherisse pulled dead bark from some of the split logs, she tossed it to the chicken who picked off any bugs or grubs. When Cherisse filled [...]
A little privacy
Posted in Chickens on November 13, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Often we will find four eggs in the same nesting box. The hens go in, one after the other; once I saw two together in the same box. They are also quite suggestible. The two middle boxes are the most popular, but when one hen started laying in the top boxes, others followed. And when [...]
Goodbye Mr. Rooster
Posted in Chickens, tagged Chickens, Dr. Laurie Lofton, Holistic veterinary care on November 9, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Mr. Rooster’s right leg has been deformed, as far as we can tell, from the beginning. We never saw any sign injury, but at about five months, when he was close to full grown, he had developed a thickened and slightly twisted right leg. This kept him from walking too far from the coop, but [...]
Winter warmth
Posted in Chickens, House on November 5, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Rebecca might be ensconced on the rocking chair by the new wood stove for the duration of the cold weather. She went out briefly today, only to come in and warm herself right next to the stove, and then resume her claim on the rocking chair.The house is toasty (68 degrees in the keeping room…unheard [...]
Chicken IQ
Posted in Chickens on November 1, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Well, we have a pretty good idea how the wandering Dominique has found herself away from home—twice—when darkness falls. She isn’t very smart! Today she was making distressed squawking sounds by the fence near the vegetable garden—she could see the coop from there, but the only way to get to it was to go completely [...]
Winter in October
Posted in Chickens, Garden on October 31, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Our friends, Jeanette and Marissa, came up from New York for the weekend, expecting fall weather. Instead we plunged right into winter. Saturday started off cool and cloudy, but by the time we came home from the farmers’ market, a slushy rain had begun to fall. Pretty soon fat flakes of snow were coming down fast, [...]
Featherfoot finds his voice
Posted in Chickens on October 28, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Well, we have finally and conclusively determined the sex of Featherfoot—he has begun to crow. The Ancona rooster (Mr. Rooster) has been crowing for months now, beginning promptly at dawn (or his new artifical dawn…a light goes on in the coop at 6 a.m., ensuring the chickens have the 14 hours of light they need to [...]