Feathered Faces in Far Away Places

One of the things I do when I'm not thinking about chickens is travel.  Matter of fact I blog about that as well.  It would be easy to think that these two interests wouldn't have a lot in common, but when you think more about it chickens are everywhere.  And when I encounter chickens in far-flung places I notice them and usually wind up with a few photographs.  Here are some pictures of a few of those chickens that I've met along the way.

I met this very cool rooster at Hacienda Buena Vista, a 19th century coffee plantation in Puerto Rico that is now run as a museum by the Puerto Rico Conservation Trust. Cockfighting is legal in Puerto Rico and is practically the national sport, but I don't think this guy had to worry about that.  There were many chickens and ducks wandering the grounds there, and his job was just to strut around and be dandy -  a job he was performing well.

This mama hen and her babies were also wandering the grounds at Hacienda Buena Vista.

Speaking of mama hens, babies, and coffee plantations, I ran into this little family at the Mountain Thunder Coffee Plantation near Kona, Hawaii.

When I was in Botswana in 2009, I crossed the border to visit a small village in Namibia.  In this case, crossing the border meant taking a small boat across the Chobe River to Impalila Island, an island formed at the confluence of the Chobe and Zambezi Rivers, just upstream from Victoria Falls.  Impalila Island contains around 60 village and about 1200 people, all of the Subia tribe.  The village I visited had around 20 houses.  Chickens and goats free-ranged throughout the village. They also had cows, but they were not allowed in the village and were grazed in the grassy area outside of town.  Since the cows were outside of the village, they were tended by herders to keep them safe from predators, and also to keep them from breaking through the acacia brush fences and marauding through the crops.  These chickens seemed small, but I am guessing that they were young.  I love the beautiful feather patterns and colors.  Would've been fun to pack a couple in my suitcase and bring them home!

I found the chickens in these last two pictures in 2015 in the little town of Pilcopata in the Peruvian rainforest.  Pilcopata extends for a few blocks along the only road in the area that ends a few miles later at the edge of the Manu Reserve.  Chickens and pigs were wandering main street of town when we stopped.  I'm not sure what's going on with the gene pool of the Pilcopata chickens, but they are pretty strange.  I'm guessing there's some Silkie in the lineage of the chicken in the upper picture and definitely Naked Neck blood in both of these birds.