Peacocks and Chinchillas

There was a squirrel in the henhouse this morning. Not really the henhouse, but their summer condo, the chicken tractor. In the winter, they spend cold days and all night in the chicken house that Steve built, and in the summer they sleep in the tractor. A tractor is just a basic A-frame, that can be easily moved around the garden. In any event, there was a squirrel poking around at the chicken tractor this morning. I was keeping an eye on it all morning, more for the potentially entertaining chicken/squirrel interaction than out of fear of the damage it would wreak. What it ended up doing was pure entertainment. It slithered its way under the 2×4 tractor frame and started going nuts (pun!) in the tractor. It had no idea how to get out. I didn’t feel sorry for it at this point, just amused. The hens were all

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Last word on chickens for the day. When it’s sunny or warm out during the day, I let the chickens out into their run under the deck. It’s fenced off with chicken wire and gives them space to run and peck around in the dirt. When I’m working, I can get up, walk down the hall, and check them out by looking through the window. I just got up to make sure they were ok, and I only saw one chicken in the run. I was hoping to see three. Not one. (Pearl was relegated to the tractor because she was being pecked at.) The other two were nowhere in sight. This had happened to me before, during the summer, when the wind had blown open the door to their tractor and stayed open most of the night. I walked into the shower one morning, opened the window to check

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Chickens are pretty amazing. They don’t have much going on – lay egg, eat food, drink water, poop, sleep for 12 hours a night, peck irreverently, act like you’re important, hop, wake up neighbors. Surprisingly, though, they have two-bit memories and are sometimes inherently cannibalistic, without ever remembering that they are. My opinion is that this is mostly due to temptation and opportunity, rather than lack of food or desire to actually eat their kin. It happens irregularly in our little flock. A hen might be shooting for a piece of corn on the ground, but mistakenly pecks on another hen’s talon, draws blood, and Eureka! Blood! Where the hell did that come from! Yesss!! I love it! Must peck more after my celebratory hop! Then, of course, the hen that’s getting pecked might not know what’s going on, she might think it’s another hen’s talon, and she starts picking

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Our chickens make me laugh. When I open up their chicken coop, 2 or 3 of them usually fly out as soon as possible. As if they know the sound I make when I open the front door, crunch snow or grass on my way over to their coop, open the backyard door, brush up against their house, and unhatch the three latches on their door. I open the door, and within a millisecond, they poke their little beaks out into the air, like a cat slipping its paw out into the cold, to see if it’s warm enough to venture outside. Unless there’s snow, they usually hop right now and get to work on the dirt. Pearl takes a bit longer. She’s a lost soul. Am I coming? Am I going? Do I need to lay an egg? Should I stay here? After the initial hop out of the

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