Counting Chickens

Fall is settling in.  The leaves are changing and the chickens are molting. Most of them look ragged and rough, some half-bald. It’s an embarrassing time to have your friends see your chickens for the first time! Hopefully their feathers will be grown in by the end of the month when we expect guests…  These pics are from when they have their regular feathers.

It’s a motley bunch of chickens but we love them. Except for Hell-Kevin the white guinea, who is available, free, with free  local delivery, to anybody who would take him off our hands. Don’t be fooled by his charming demeanor.  He has been so vicious to the hens (and even to Handsome, who outweighs him by about 3X but nonetheless succumbs to Hell-Kevin’s wrath) that we had to put him out of the chicken pasture and coop. He free-ranges on the property now, looking for things to beat up, when he isn’t outside the fence yelling at the chickens. We’re kinda rooting for ‘natural causes’ but no such luck yet.

I love the Buckeyes more than ever and plan to raise more. (If you don’t know about Buckeye Chickens you can read about them here at the ALBC website—one of my favorite organizations to support… )

Then there’s our old girls: Little Bit the one bantam and Old Yella who could be six or seven and still lays an ENORMOUS egg every few weeks. It’s so big the top won’t close on egg carton. Chickens lay regularly their first two years, then laying dwindles down quickly. Old Yella has a solid black sister (not pictured) who does the same. These chickens were from my original batch when we bought the place five years ago now, they were purchased as at-least second-year adults from the Centerton poultry auction—a rural and cross-cultural experience you should experience at least once!

We’d been wondering just how old chickens can live to be and I thought it was seven or eight till I read about R. Creasy’s Mr. X who was FIFTEEN!!  Most chickens, lets just say, live much, much shorter lives. Even seven is not the fate of most real country chickens….but they all have a good, good life at Larrapin, and the length is almost always MUCH longer than found in nature.  Most wild birds don’t make it thorough their second winter…the common lifespan in nature can be startlingly short!  Farm chickens are luckier, but still, a Chicken’s list of ‘natural causes’ includes about everything on four legs, two legs, crockpots & freezers, two wings, colds, health issues and the mysterious DFO (a descriptive but distinctly unofficial radio code from Mendy’s policing days for “done fell out”) where the cause is unknown…but a chicken is down for good.   For the record, Mr. X was a pet and came in the house every night to a pet-carrier!  But our old gals are going strong for now and in chicken-universe, now is what counts!

Finally, there’s the one chicken who causes no problems whatsoever: Herald the metal chicken, yard art we were lucky enough to find down at Daisy’s and Olive’s vintage shop in Prairie Grove, Arkansas. He is well-behaved and good looking year round. We should all be so lucky!

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