In the Coop & Around the World - November 18, 2018
Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s what’s happening in the coop and elsewhere this week!
Meet the Flock: Here’s a recent shot of Petula Cluck, the Silkie pullet - the other Hipster Hens and I just call her Clucksie. Clucksie is certainly not the brightest hen in the flock, but she's fairly adorable and has a sweet personality. And, she’s just started laying cute li'l Silkie pullet eggs about the size of the end of your thumb!
I was actually surprised when I found the first little Silkie egg in the nest box last week. The Silkies are certainly old enough to start laying, but fall is sliding toward winter and you just never know with Silkies—I thought maybe I wouldn’t get any eggs from them until spring.
The first Silkie egg! Shown here, for size comparison, with an egg from one of the Cream Legbars gathered at the same time.
Marilyn Henroe hard at work.
So, I had this lovely little egg, but I didn’t know who the perpetrator was! It took several days and several more eggs before I finally caught her in the nestbox hard at work. It was Marilyn Henroe! Here she is, making eggs!
And now Clucksie has joined her! Two Silkie hens (half my Silkie flock, mind you!) laying eggs for my morning scramble, every day! Life is good!
Item: Thanksgiving is on Thursday! Thanksgiving is that holiday when we take stock of all the good things in our lives and are thankful for them. It also usually involves a turkey. While this is a website that celebrates all things poultry, spending any time talking about cooked poultry on a plate really doesn’t fit too well with the way poultry is treated or discussed here. So here’s a turkey video where turkeys are not the victims. Matter of fact they’re downright menacing. Turkeys everywhere will, without a doubt, enjoy this vid quite a bit. The Postal Service—maybe not quite so much.
Item: The California fires that have been occurring the last couple of weeks are horrible and the loss of life, lost homes, and destruction of property has left a pall over the country even larger than the smoke plume that covers much of California. There’s at least one heartwarming story to come out of that awful situation, and it involves chickens! A California CHP officer was patrolling devastated Paradise on the lookout for looters. What he found instead was a dozen sad and hungry chickens that literally ran to him. He gave them all the water he had with him, but he didn’t have any food - so he found some cereal in a garage and fed them that. This kind act was definitely above and beyond the call of duty for this officer. But it gets better: He took some pictures of the chickens and posted them on the CHP Facebook page—and then the chickens’ owners, who without a doubt thought their hens had perished in the fire, saw the pictures on Facebook and knew that their babies were OK and were being tended. Since they were not allowed to go back into the area, they contacted the officer and gave him food and supplies and he’s been tending the chickens ever since! Here’s the whole story.
One more item: In a blog article I posted a while back about imprinting in birds, I talked about how the ancient Chinese figured out how to imprint freshly hatched baby ducks on a special stick. The owner of the flock of ducks could lead the entire flock to the fields each day and back home each night to the duck pens simply by carrying that stick! Talking about this phenomenon is one one thing, but actually seeing it play out is, well, phenomenal. Take a look at this YouTube video of millions and millions of ducks!
