Meet the Flock Roundup - May & June 2018

The latest bit of paraphernalia that I've added to the coop to keep the girls entertained is a small mirror. Here Moe the Faverolles takes a quick look to make sure her feathers are all attractively in place.

Meet the Flock Roundup - March & April 2018

 Moe the Salmon Faverolles saunters through the tractor alley in the pole barn. I let the girls into this normally chicken-free space occasionally in the winter to break the monotony. On warm days I open the pop door to the chicken run whereupon all the hens rush to the door, take one look out and exclaim, “What?? There’s still snow out there!  Why would we go out there?”

Meet the Flock Roundup—January & February, 2018

Here’s Squawky the Speckled Sussex pullet. Not only is she pretty, but she’s got to be the world’s friendliest chicken. She makes it hard for me to walk through the chicken run because she’s always right there with me – right underfoot!

Meet the Flock—November & December 2017

Here’s a shot of Carmen Maranda the big Cuckoo Marans hen having a meditative moment in the chicken run.

Here’s my photogenic little bantam frizzled Cochin roo, Paul!

Meet the Flock - September & October 2017

Marissa the Cream Legbar sez “Braaaaak! Don’t take that shot! If you hold the camera that close I’ll look RIDICULOUS!”

Here’s a nice shot of Paulette and Marissa the Cream Legbar hens from about a year ago – they were just starting to lay eggs!

Paulette could be the world’s most molty chicken in this shot! She only has two tail feathers left, but she’s really, really proud of them!

Meet the Flock Roundup – August 2017

Snowball the Silkie Rooster:  Feeling very modern and sophisticated in his fancy new hen pen.

Emile the Bantam Cochin Roo: "You conniving scoundrel! Here you are in my coop with that menacing camera contraption again! You've been warned! If you harm my hens in any way you will feel the wrath of my fierce spurs!"

Meet the Flock Roundup – July 2017

Suddenly, after celebrating her one-month birthday, Paula the Salmon Faverolles chick is starting to look like a teenage chicken. Look at the feathers sprouting all over her legs & her pretty salmon colored wing feathers!

Squawky the Speckled Sussex chick looks longingly out the window at the great wide world. A week after this shot, the chicks had their first opportunity to go outside!

Meet the Flock Roundup – May & June, 2017

Meet Veronica the Easter Egger, a prolific layer of green eggs. Veronica's in her 5th year and was the only Easter Egger of her generation to lay continuously through this past winter. Such a hard worker! And very pretty to boot!

Meet the Flock Roundup - March & April, 2017

Meet Sam! Sammy joined the flock with a bunch of other chicks of a variety of breeds in 2013. Sam was a mystery chick at first - she didn't fit the pattern for any of the breeds and I was totally kerflummoxed as far as what she might be. I should have followed the rule of thumb, that if you don't know what a hen is, she's probably an Easter Egger - since they're not a true breed (they're a cross of any number of breeds with Auracanas/Americanas). Sure enough, when Sam started growing her distinctive (and highly attractive, I might add) ear tufts, I knew for a fact that she was an Easter Egger girl. Later, when she started laying those green eggs, that confirmed it!

Here's another picture of Sam. This is a picture from 2013, right after her first adult molt. Chickens can sometimes show subtle variations in feather patterns from one molt to the next and after this molt Sam had a delicate "necklace" of light gray feather. She lost this attractive feature after her next molt and it's never shown up again!

Meet the Flock Roundup - January & February 2017

Meet Paul!  Paul is my "second-in-command" rooster and is a frizzled bantam Cochin.  "Frizzled" refers to his curly feathers, "bantam" to his diminutive size, and Cochin is his breed - a sweet-tempered, feather-footed breed that originated in China.  In this shot, Paul is out for a walk in the leaf-covered chicken run in mid-November.

"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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“Meet the Flock” Roundup—September & October, 2016

Meet Darcy Barred Rock, the fourth hen in the quartet of Barred Rock hens that rule the Hipster Hen roost. Darcy isn’t super friendly like Arlene, she isn’t super clever like Barbara, and she isn’t super bossy like Charlie. She is, perhaps, one of those individuals who would be characterized by all observers as “the other one”. But I don’t think Darcy cares. I think she knows that she’s SORT OF friendly and clever—and maybe just a little bit bossy. And other than that she’s happy to be the hen that goes about her business of laying one of those nice brown eggs nearly every day!

Meet Emile, the birchen Cochin rooster. Well, actually, you’ve already met Emile. This is a recent picture that I like quite a bit that I had to share—Emile in all his roosterly splendor!

Meet Emily, the plump and personable black Silkie hen. Emily really does have eyes but they’re hard to see because they’re sort of hidden in her fluff and they’re black--just like the rest of her. Emily’s eyes, and the rest of her for that matter, are hard to photograph. She just sort of absorbs all the light and ends up looking like a silhouette. I haven’t ever taken a picture that I feel does her justice, but she’s so darn cute I’m gonna keep trying!

Emily the Silkie stares contemplatively through the chicken run fence on a nice fall day.

Meet Maran the cuckoo Marans hen. She’s pictured here with her constant companion, Carmen Maranda. Maran and Carmen are in their third year—these two girls and Angitou the golden Polish hen joined the flock as babies in the summer of 2014 and came from Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa. Marans can come in nine different colors, but Maran and Carmen’s cuckoo color is the most common in the US. In addition to being pretty birds, my Marans hens lay beautiful dark chocolate brown eggs.

Here's Carmen Maranda and Maran the cuckoo Marans hens as kids in the summer of 2014, along with their friend Angitou the golden Polish hen.

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 Jennifer, my fourth year white crested black Polish hen.  Jennifer was so sick that I removed her from the flock for a while in late September, but she did a rapid and spectacular bounce-back and I’m happy to report that she’s completely recovered now.  I was sure that Jennifer would be eager to model the new chicken sweaters, but she apparently felt otherwise.

In Memorium:  Sweet Roxie the Rhode Island Red.  Gone but not forgotten.

"Meet the Flock" Roundup - July & August, 2016

Meet Snowball the Silkie Rooster. This personable little roo has an amazingly long back story for one so young and fluffy. In 2013 I picked three baby chicks out of a batch of straight run fluffy-footed chicks at a local feed store. “Straight run” means that the chicks had not been sexed, so their gender was unknown. “Fluffy-footed” means just that –these chicks would turn into chickens that would have feathers all the way down their legs and on their feet. In my inexperience, I was hoping for three Silkie hens. I’m glad I was not playing the lottery that day, since all three chicks became roosters. Two of them were not even Silkies – early on I figured out that Emile and Paul were roosters (like when they started crowing!), and that they were both bantam Cochins. Snowball was the only Silkie. Sexing baby chicks is difficult – it requires the ability to see minor variations in the baby chicks’ cloacae. It’s so difficult to sex chicks that it is considered as much art as science, and is only done by professionals. Baby Silkies display such minor cloacal differences that it’s pretty much impossible to sex them at all. So you have to wait until they’re approaching maturity before you have any idea if they’re hens or roosters. And Snowball was a late bloomer. We were well into the fall when Snowball got up one day, looked around, and crowed. Unfortunately, since Paul and Emile had declared their roosterhood weeks before Snowball got around to it, crowing was exactly the wrong thing for him to do. Every day from that point on, Snowball’s life became an exercise in escaping the wrath of the other two roosters. Even the hens became hostile to him and soon everybody was picking on him. In due course, he was afraid to leave the roost – even to eat or drink. I started putting him by the water font so he would drink under my protection and I would hold him on my lap and feed him out of my hand. That kept him alive, but his was a pretty pathetic existence. Eventually I built a small 4x4 coop just for him, complete with a sign proclaiming, “SNOWBALL’S SWINGIN’ BACHELOR PAD”. He lived there by himself for about a year. Then, in 2014 I built a second coop which became Snowball’s new home and since then I’ve gradually introduced more chickens to that coop. Today, Coop 2 is home to two Silkie hens, a golden Polish hen, a buff Orpington, and the four teenage Cream Legbars. And Snowball is lord of the manor!

Meet Betty the Easter Egger! Easter Eggers are not a true breed. Rather, they are a cross of a variety of different breeds with Auracanas, a South American breed that lays blue eggs. Auracanas lay blue eggs by adding biliverdin, a hemoglobin byproduct, to their eggshells. Easter Eggers can lay eggs that range from blue to olive green. This sweet hen used to be a regular layer of pretty light-green eggs, but has not laid an egg since last fall. At age three, she’s only middle-aged, but I suspect that Betty may have opted for early retirement!

Meet Bonnie the Cream Legbar pullet! Bonnie is one of the baby chicks I got at the end of March and is unique because she doesn’t have a tail. Poultry people refer to this condition as “rumplessness” and in addition to no tail feathers, rumpless chickens are also lacking a tailbone. There are breeds of rumpless chickens, but Legbars are not one of those breeds, so I don’t know what’s going on with Bonnie. At first I was chalking it up to the Auracana (a rumpless South American breed) genetics in Cream Legbars, but after doing some more reading I now realize that when R.C. Punnett developed the Cream Legbar in the 1930's he didn't use Auracanas per se - the blue egg and the crest genes came from a "yellow-brown colored, crested Chilean hen"—no mention of the hen not having a tail. I’ve exchanged emails with the breeder that Bonnie came from and she is surprised – this has never occurred in her chickens before. I suppose that this must be a spontaneous mutation, which makes Bonnie very special. I expect once she’s a little older she’ll develop super powers.

Here's another picture of Bonnie enjoying a little leaf tidbit in the chicken run.

Meet Buffy the Buff Orpington hen. Buffy is in her fourth year, but maintains her girlish figure and turns out a continuous stream of those lovely brown eggs. She does stop laying eggs on occasion and goes broody. She actually is the only non-Silkie hen in my flock that has bouts of broodiness. I'm hatching a plan (no pun intended, of course!) to put her broodiness to good purpose by using her as the broody hen for next year’s batch of chicks.

Meet Carmen Maranda the cuckoo Marans and Mary the golden Campine. This is not a fabulous picture of either hen, but it’s a great juxtaposition of the largest and smallest hens in the big coop. Carmen, as mild mannered as she is large, lays beautiful chocolate brown eggs and Mary, high-energy and aloof, lays petite white eggs.

Meet Charlie Barred Rock. Charlie is in her fourth year, and just between us, is kind of bossy and verbose. She never stops talking! How can any hen have so much to say? Charlie is the largest of the Barred Rocks and she is without a doubt the alpha hen in the flock, so maybe all that talk is just her reminding the other hens how cool she is.

Meet Courtney the white Silkie hen. If you’ve followed this blog for any time you may feel Courtney needs no introduction, since you no doubt followed the story of Courtney raising the batch of Cream Legbar chicks as their surrogate mom. But Courtney actually has a secret past! Courtney started life in an amazing local bookstore that is not only filled with tons of children’s books, but also a variety of animals for the kids to interact with. Courtney was known as Iggy Peck back then—a perfect name for a chicken living in a bookstore! While Courtney is the smallest chicken in my flock, she makes up for her size with her assertiveness, and apparently that part of her personality manifested itself in her previous life as well. She not only made life miserable for the other chicken in the store, a poor hen-pecked little rooster named Neal, but one fateful day she also pecked a toddler. It was a soft peck and the toddler was not harmed, but Courtney lost her job selling books that day. So then she came to live here at the ranch. The bookstore folks report that since “Iggy Peck” left, Neal has blossomed into a happy, outgoing rooster that loves the attention that all of the kids bestow on him. And Courtney has become a Hipster Hen and a mom! So this is a story with happy ending for everybody!

"Meet The Flock" Roundup - May & June, 2016

Here's a recent picture of Angitou the Golden Polish hen. Angitou went through a rare spring molt (chickens typically lose their feathers and grow new ones in the fall). She looked like a porcupine for a while with all those pin feathers sticking out, but now she's got all that shiny new plumage & is quite attractive. Angitou lays an abundance of small white eggs, & has a sweet personality - she's happy to be picked up & carried around.

Meet Angitou the Polish hen as a child! The popularity of the Facebook post on Angitou was pleasantly surprising. That was the first of a planned series of pictures of the chickens in my flock. I chose Angitou for the first one not because she is the prettiest, or my favorite, but simply because I decided to do it alphabetically. But due to Angitou's new-found fame, here's another of her - a photo from her childhood! She's about six weeks old in this 2014 shot.

Meet Emile. Flock provider and protector or abusive polygamist? You be the judge. Emile is a bantam birchen Cochin and the alpha rooster in my flock. Cochin is the name for Emile’s breed - a fluffy footed chicken breed that originated in China. Birchen describes his handsome silver and black color pattern. Bantam refers to his diminutive size but in no way reflects on his attitude. As the alpha roo, Emile is a busy guy - always hurrying from one part of the run to another to end interpersonal kerfuffles between the hens and he is always vigilant and on the look-out for predators while the flock nonchalantly pecks and scratches its way through the run. He would fight to the death to defend his hens and has actually taken me on more than once when I’ve had to pick up or interact with a protesting hen. A less positive attribute is that Emile is a busy guy in other ways. His quest for “favors” from the hens is never-ending, and he regards the whole flock as his “hens with benefits”. He does perform a cute little courtship dance (stay tuned for a movie of the “Emile Shuffle”), but that’s all he’s got – no witty repartee, no flowers and no candy. It’s just dance then hop on. And he doesn’t understand the concept of “consent”. His idea of consent is when the hen doesn’t run away. No, actually, his idea of consent is when the hen doesn’t run away fast enough. A pretty primitive attitude, perhaps, but excusable in his case – he’s a chicken, don’t you know.

This sweet hen is Willow the buff Orpington, one of the senior members of my flock. Orpington is the name of Willow’s breed. Orpingtons were originally developed near Orpington in the county of Kent, England. “Buff” refers to her pretty yellow color. Willow is a large hen – so large that I’ve always worried about her injuring herself as she ungracefully flies/jumps/falls off the roost each morning. I’ve always tried to get to the coop before her attempt and have gently lifted her down. Unfortunately, my fears have been realized and Willow recently sustained some sort of injury. I noticed that she had developed a limp. There was nothing obvious when I looked her over and I’ve hoped that she would eventually recover, but instead she’s actually gotten worse. Willow now walks slowly and no longer roosts at night – she can’t jump onto the roost. The worse part of her situation is the abuse she gotten from Emile the rooster. Emile is looking for “favors” from his hens constantly and his idea of consent is when the hen doesn’t run away fast enough. Poor Willow can’t run. And Emile likes it rough – Willow is missing feathers on her back where Emile digs in with his spurs, and the back of her head is bald where Emile grabs on with his beak. Willow is now living in a shelter and has a restraining order against Emile. The restraining order was issued by me and the shelter is the center part of the pole barn where I normally keep tools and park the tractor. She’s living there by herself, but she can visit the chickens in both coops through the fence any time she wants. She’s eating well, is bright eyed and alert, and while she is still moving around slowly, she seems to be improving. Eventually, I may introduce her into the small coop with Snowball and the Silkie hens and see how that goes. It’s a little less rough and tumble there, and she may fit right in.

This is Arlene, a Barred Plymouth Rock hen. “Barred” refers to her black and white stripes and Plymouth Rock is the name of her breed – a breed developed in New England in the early 1800’s. Pretty much everybody shortens Barred Plymouth Rock to “Barred Rock.” Arlene was among the first batch of chicks I got in 2013 and has the distinction of being the first hen ever to lay and egg here at the ranch. When she was younger, Arlene would fly up to my shoulder so she could see the world from a higher perspective. She apparently feels that sort of behavior is not appropriate for an adult hen, since she’s stopped doing it. She still does persistently follow me around the coop and will occasionally peck me on the leg—not to be aggressive but just to remind me that she’s there.

Meet Barbara the Barred Rock. At the risk of being risqué, this is a picture of Barbara taking a bath. Chickens, counterintuitively, take a bath by wallowing in the dirt. They usually find a spot in the chicken run with exposed dirt and dig a hole to get the dirt loose, then they roll around in the dirt while flapping their wings and kicking their feet to make as big a mess as possible—all the while clucking contentedly. Then they get up and produce a huge dust cloud by shaking themselves off. I’m sure that if you asked them they couldn’t tell you why they do this, but the process does destroy mites and other critters that like to live in chicken’s feathers and suck their blood. Since my Minnesota hens can’t dust-bathe outside when the ground is covered with snow, I have this section of cement culvert on its side in the coop which I keep about half full of a mixture of sand, wood ashes, and diatomaceous earth. It is big enough for two or three chickens to take a communal bath while others perch on the edge and socialize. Stay tuned for a movie of Barbara dust bathing that I shot at the same time I took this photo!