"Meet the Flock" Roundup – November & December, 2016

Meet Marissa the Cream Legbar. I captured this picture of Marissa in August—about the time she started laying eggs. Since then, Marissa has laid a pretty little blue-green pullet egg almost every day, and each egg is incrementally larger than the previous one. My older hens have scaled waaay back on egg production lately, since they’ve started their fall molt. So many days the four eggs I get from my four young Legbar hens outnumber the eggs I get from the rest of the flock!

Here's one more picture of Marissa. This is a picture of Marissa as a teenager - taken in late May.

Here's another picture of Marissa the Cream Legbar back in late April when she was a mere three weeks old and had just grown her first set of feathers.

Meet Mary, the diminutive, free-spirited, golden Campine hen. Mary is always the first chicken out of the coop in the morning when the doors swing open. She would much rather be free-ranging outdoors than cooped up in the coop. I think there’s more wild jungle fowl blood flowing through Mary’s veins than in my other chickens. She’s definitely not one of those chickens that tolerates being picked up and cuddled. So I give her as much freedom as I can give a domestic chicken and in return she gives me an ample supply of those nice little white eggs.

One more picture of Mary the Campine. This is her baby picture from the spring of 2013.

Here's an August picture of Nicky the pretty Cream Legbar pullet. Nicky's one of the four Legbar babies who hatched this past spring. All four Legbars are a little skittish and standoffish - maybe because they had a real hen for a mom and imprinted on her rather than being raised under heat lamps and imprinting on me. They are all slowly becoming tamer and less nervous around me and Nicky is the most social. She will actually stand on my lap and eat treats out of my hand now. Soon as the treats are gone, though, so is she!

Here's another pic of Nicky - shot at the same time as last week’s picture. In this shot she's doing her "fierce predator" routine--silently working her way through the foliage & preying on unsuspecting bugs and worms.

One final picture of Nicky the Legbar Chicky! This was shot in May when Nicky was about five weeks old. A teenager!

Meet Bailey, the sweet sixteen-year-old Labrador retriever. Oh, wait! Bailey appears to be a non-chicken! Yup - she is not a chicken, but it's high time she got her picture posted considering her status as the Hipster Hen Chicken Ranch Official Dog. I've mentioned Bailey in a couple posts, and featured her fascinating back-story in “A Dog Story.”

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