Which new hen is laying this pale blue egg? I’d been wondering about it for a while. Now I know. It is shy, elegant Forest. She looks like a hen who would lay a blue eggs.
Category: About My Chickens
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Egg of Forest
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Yuzu-hime Lays an Egg
More young hens are laying eggs now. This afternoon I spotted Yuzu-Hime on a nest. She and her sister have been eying the nests lately. Every few days, I find an egg I don’t recognize in one of the nests. I keep an eye on Yuzu-Hime, and when she flies down from the nest, I see her fresh egg. Now I know what her eggs look like … and so do you.
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Kindling
Kindling is a necessity this time of year. Maybe not for you, but for me it is. Quite a few years ago, my husband gave me this handy Swedish design log splitter. It’s called a Smart-Splitter and makes splitting logs into kindling a breeze.
Axes are good for splitting rounds into firewood. But when it comes to splitting firewood into slender pieces of kindling, the Smart-Splitter works even better. The blade rides a fixed post, so you can set the blade exactly where you want it, and when you drop the weight which falls onto the blade, it splits the log in two. It’s a failsafe way to split smaller and smaller pieces of wood in two. It doesn’t take long to make a bundle of kindling to start fires.
Seeing Hazel with her whole brood this afternoon was a pleasant surprise. With some hens, the break with their children is immediate. One minute they are sweet mother hen, “Here’s a plump worm children.” The next minute they are, “You’re off on your own – shoo!”
Other hens are like Hazel, spending less and less time with them each day, but still there when the children need some reassuring. Sort of like people, some chicks grow up with stern mothers, others with gentle ones. There are the no nonsense, “Children! Stay within eyesight at all times!” mothers, and the carefree ones who let their children do most anything they want, with every parenting style in between.
I never would have thought mother hens have so many different parenting styles. You certainly don’t read books detailing the parenting styles of mother hens, though if one were to write a serious one, it would easily require hundreds of pages. Add illustrations, studies on how childhood experiences influence parenting styles, the effect of this and that, the roles mother hens play in the success of roosters, et cetera, et cetera, and you’re talking about a thousand pages or more, perhaps even a few volumes. Now that would be a find in a library: three to five, leather bound, hefty volumes, an exhaustive treatise on how mother hens raise their children, with a companion compendium on evolutionary similarities between human and chicken child rearing.
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Getting to the Other Side
This morning I found Hazel by herself, enjoying a quiet morning, drinking water alone after spending the night on the roost. None of her chicks were around. They were outdoors, on their own. Her mothering days are over. She was a great mother. Just yesterday, I took the picture below of her with her chicks around her. Two and a half months ago, in late July, she was basking in the glow of hatching a clutch of lovely chicks. The baby chick on the far right of the second photo below, is the chicken without neck feathers to the far left of Hazel. The gray chick in the middle the black chicken to the left of Hazel. The yellow chick is the yellow chicken whose head is behind Hazel’s tail. There are two more of her children not in the photos.
I wonder how hens feel when they finish raising their clutches. Are they relieved, exhausted, sad? Do they feel anything? The first hen I saw raise a clutch, Madeleine, went for a long walk in the woods when she finished raising her chicks. The look on her face said, “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.”
Madeleine would have loved the new bridge. It is a hit with the chickens. They use it all day long to get to the other side. Getting to the other side … it’s a big thing with chickens.
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Yeah! No Rain!
Yeah! No rain! Unlike the other day when Tangerine had to huddle her chicks out of the rain, there’s no rain, and she and her chicks can take their after lunch nap outdoors, where chickens would rather be.
It doesn’t matter how windy or cold it is, nothing beats a grassy spot outdoors for an after lunch nap. While she preens and stands guard, her chicks nap and preen, nap and preen, nap and preen. Though, lunch isn’t something chickens do. They peck and eat much of the morning. It’s more like a digestive break after an extended brunch, think of upperclass Victorian women resting after a long morning of tea, biscuits, and gossip.
This afternoon the gray chick may have napped too long. Maybe it was having one of those dreams from which you can’t wake up. It got separated from its mothers and siblings. They were deep in the woods, scratching through the brush, and it was peeping frantically, running everyplace looking for them. After twenty minutes of running around, it found them and settled down.
