Happy Chickens

The chickens love spring. I don’t know that for a fact but they seem happy and helpful. They’re back to running loose, chasing and eating grasshoppers to help save the garden and munching on spiders to keep their mom from being bitten!

What’s funny is that they stay kinda segregated and I have no idea how they know which ones are like each other. There are were 14  in one coop so they do all live together and I would have thought they think of themselves as one big happy family but like most human families, there always seems to be some amount of unrest among the chickens.

Above are the red chickens and there are 1o of them. Below are the Iowa Blues and there are 3 of them.

Then, there’s this one poor Ameraucana. They pick on her mercilessly! 

If we leave her in the coop with the others, they peck on her til she’s bleeding so she now resides in the chicken hospital. I think they don’t like her because they know she lays beautiful greenish blue eggs. What’s weird is in MO, our red chickens were so sweet and docile and our Ameraucanas picked on them and on me and here, the red chickens are evil and conniving and the Ameraucana is docile and sweet. To tell you the truth, I do not like these red chickens at all and if they all ran away from home tomorrow, I would not be sad.

Last night we were at Tractor Supply and they had Rhode Island Red pullets and Buff Orpington straight runs.  Vince said “Are Rhode Island Reds good chickens?” I told him I liked Buffs better but we have no room for more chickens. He looked at me and we both thought . . we could butcher those red ones and the Iowa Blues . . but neither of us said it and we both said “No! We’re not doing that!” and we left with no baby chicks. That’s two out of two trips we’ve left Tractor Supply without getting chicks.  Yay!

One day last week, I got 31 eggs . . in one day. If our red chickens and the Iowa Blues ran away from home, I would be better off not even replacing them. I’d still get more than a dozen eggs a day . . even without my best layers.

See the green egg . . that’s from the Ameraucana. See the white egg with the pointy tip? That’s from the Anconas (Italian leghorns). Such beautiful eggs!  That basket of eggs makes those pesky chickens worth their trouble.

They follow me around all day long. From wherever they may be, they can hear the door open and they come running. They’re so determined to be first in line . . they pay no attention to what I’m doing and if I stop, they run into me. I’ve learned that if I’m going somewhere in the car (which rarely happens), I have to leave them in the fence and not even let them loose because they will try to get in the car with me. It isn’t that they like me any more than I like them but they know that I often have treats/kitchen scraps so . . the early bird gets the worm.