It’s Iris and Wysteria season, a terrific time of the year to be outdoors.
It’s an auspicious day to be born. These chicks are just hours old, safe and snug with their mother. The clutch is due tomorrow so these two are on the early side.
It’s a day for making a fuss. Hazel is making a fuss, but so many hens do after they’ve laid an egg. I guess if we had something as large as an egg coming out of our butt, we’d want to talk about it too.
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It’s a day for temporary art. The alcove in the entry way is a handy place to display eggs gathered this afternoon.
Category: Raising Chicks
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Iris, Wysteria, and Babies
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In Thick Brush
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Mother hens spend a lot of time with their chicks in thick brush. The brush provides cover from predators and their is a cornucopia of good bugs and worms to eat in the forest floor. Chickens evolved from jungle fowl, and they need to spend a good portion of their day hunting in thick brush and forest.
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On Mother’s Day
This is a tribute to the 99.999999999999% of chicks who don’t have a mother. Who are hatched in mechanical incubators, rushed to broilers and laying barns, and grow up never spending a night snuggled under a mother’s warm feathers.
This is a tribute to the 99.999999999999% of laying hens who never get to hatch a single one of the many hundreds of eggs they lay. Who never get to express their love for little chicks.
A melodramatic, sentimental tribute, and yet, perhaps the fact that we don’t even stop to consider that chicks do need a mother, and think it quaint that there are still places that have mother hens raising chicks, speaks more about what has happened to us humans than anything.
A mother hen teaches the chicks manners. She teaches them to be confident in the presence of other hens, and to mingle with the rest of the flock.
Happy Mother’s Day! The chicks who have mothers sure adore them.
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Waiting for Mother
These six week old chicks are resting while their mother is off laying an egg. At six weeks, they are still tiny, and yet some commercial breeds are large enough to butcher by the time they are six weeks old. It will take these chicks all summer to get that large. -
How a Mother Hen Protects Her Chicks
One of the way a mother hen protects her chicks is by fluffing up and making herself look much larger. It’s almost comical watching these fluff-balls protecting their little ones.
