What name do I give this chick? One of Hazel’s chicks has a woodpecker face. It has a featherless neck like Hazel, a Turken chicken. These naked neck Turkens are from Transylvania. This little chick’s biological mother is Special, Hazel’s daughter. Special is a cross between Hazel and Sven, a Swedish Flower Chicken.

Ungetsu-hime 雲月姫 brought her chicks out of the woods today. Like many a parent, she’s too proud of them to squirrel them away in the woods. It’s like she’s flaunting them. This one will be a doctor, this one a lawyer, this one a …

I will be curious where she takes them tonight to bed down. Will she take them back into the woods or find a spot in the chicken yard? There are already three hens with chicks bedding in adjoining nests in one quiet corner of the chicken coop. Somehow they manage to keep their chicks apart. When two hens with clutches get too close and their clutches intermingle, it’s like watching soccer moms trying to corral their tots. Chaos. It’s best to go inside and have a beer or a glass of wine. The mother hens get it all sorted out in the end. There’s no point getting my nerves frayed. Mother hens know best.

Yesterday Hazel took her chicks out for the first time. Out and about she took them. Down the path and through the mint and bachelor buttons, to all the places beautiful she took them. This is why chicks need a mother, someone to show them the beautiful places.

Can you find Hazel’s face in the last picture?

I was heading out the gate on my bicycle to pedal down to the post office when I heard baby chicks chirping in the woods. When I went to check if they were in trouble, I found Ungetsu-hime with a brood of one or two day old chicks. I didn’t even know she was sitting on eggs. What a surprise.

And this is the nest where she hatched her six chicks, a fairy tale nest inside a tree stump with a thick roof of moss and dried ferns. You can see three unhatched eggs near the bottom in the middle of the picture. Below is a closeup of the nest. How many chicks get to be hatched in the woods? These chicks could be the first generation of the wild forest chickens of Bow Hill. If some decades from now you read in Nature or National Geographic about the elusive, mysterious Bow Hill forest fowl, you will know that Ungetsu-hime is the mother of them all.

I knew my eggs were good, and today I received proof. Back in June, Mother Earth News organized nutrient testing for eggs so I sent in a dozen eggs to be tested. I received the results today, and the eggs my hens lay have more than three times the omega-3 fat that regular eggs have. A regular egg has 74 milligrams of omega-3 fat per 100 grams. My hens lay eggs with 250 milligrams of omega-3 fat per 100 grams, 338% more! The complete details are below.

I attribute the high omega-3 fat content of my eggs due to all the fresh greens and bugs and other things my hens find to eat as they roam through the woods and brush and grasses. I also believe the amount of sunshine and exercise they get plays a part. Chickens can’t live without sunshine. They can’t live without dustbaths. They can’t live without room to run to their heart’s content. They can’t, they can’t, they can’t.