Eggs Come Out of Chickens' Bums....




OK, OK, everyone knows we get eggs from chickens, but did you know that they only have....one hole for both eggs and poo? Too much detail? Well, when you get chickens and start reading books about chickens, that is one of the interesting little details you find out!

Yes, I am now co-parenting four Isared chickens. They're rather cute, and very soft and fluffly. They have distinct personalites - the dominatrix (dominachick) has already shown her stuff at keeping the other ladies in line, and there is definitely a "hen-pecked" one on the bottom of the pecking order, meaning that dominachick pecks her when she is getting too many of the goodies that I feed them.




Chickens are constantly in motion, so its hard to get nice photos as they just don't know when to stop for the photo shoot. They're always doing what I call the chicken "two step": two steps back, scratch scratch, then peck peck. They just love to scratch around for whatever it is they're looking for - bugs, grass, worms, and they will even eat mice...though I'm not sure about snakes. The chicken pen used to be all grass and moss, but guess what? After one industrious week, the chickens have turned it into dirt! They love dirt, so it seems, and like to take "dust baths" - they roll around in the dirt to keep the lice and mites out from under their wings!


The girls just love to eat. Of course they have their constantly full "hopper" of special organic chicken feed for anytime grazing.



And then I feed them special treats. Our little "treat" routine is as follows: I walk over to the chicken pen and talk to them in chicken talk. This is their cue to all come running from wherever they were. They usually line up at the fence, just waiting for whatever little morsel I have for them - they really like cucumber and bread crumbs, but aren't so crazy about apple cores. One could be deluded into thinking that they like you when they all come running over, but in reality, they love food.....I'm learning not to take it personally.



Conveniently, the house where I'm living already had a chicken house and pen, so once the girls got acquainted with their new place, they loved it!



The next day, three of them laid an egg!



Of course, eggs are the raison d'etre for having these little ladies, and on average there have been three eggs every day. If you get there soon after they've been laid, they're nice and warm. I had never thought about the real meaning of "fresh" until I picked up my first "warm" egg. I wasn't quite sure what to do with it.....put it in the fridge to cool it down first? Slurp it down raw? Cook it up right away? Eventually I put is aside and had it for lunch. I just couldn't do it totally fresh from the chicken's you know where.

Believe it or not, chickens are really nice to talk to, and its very easy to learn chicken chat. When I go to let them out in the morning, I start talking to them before I open the door. Immediately, they all start talking back to me, so they know I'm coming and I know they're up, and no one gets startled. Dominachick has a very distinctive call, sort of like the first two bars of Reveille, that famous Remembrance Day trumpet tune. The others chat in your more average chicken chat way.



So for all you out there who come to visit paradise this summer, you can meet my fine feathered friends!