Chickens Are Smart

My sweet friend Sharon Allen even got me Chicken Boots to celebrate my new Farm-girl status!

ME:
Green Acres is the place to be. 
Farm livin’ is the life for me. 
Land spreadin’ out so far and wide 
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside. 

DAVE:
New York is where I’d rather stay. 
I get allergic smelling hay. 
I just adore a penthouse view. 
Dah-ling I love you but give me Park Avenue. 

…The chores. 
…The stores. 
…Fresh air. 
…Times Square 

You are my wife. 
Good bye, city life. 
Green Acres we are there. 

From the Sitcom Green Acres starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor

You get the idea…Dave was open to the country life but way more inclined for a life in a more civilized place like Seattle.  I, on the other hand, was tired of the city and wanted all the critters.

Chickens are way cooler than you think, and they are not dumb like people say.  Well, maybe some are a bit slow…but that isn’t my experience.  I have one, especially smart chicken, Pokey-Dot.  I’ll introduce you to her but first a little back story about our chicken adventures.

Each Spring, Coastal Farm and Ranch store has rows and rows of peeping baby chicks.  When Dave and I go in to get food for our goats, I can’t resist the cuteness of the little fluff balls.  The little baby peeping sounds tug at my maternal instincts and I just want to care for the hundreds of baby chicks like a momma hen.  This is dangerous and childish…I know. 

Each time we go to the Farm Store, Dave forbids me to even take a tiny peak, as all the little babies call out to Momma Jill to save them.

Before he knew how crazy I was, Dave let me take a peak into the bucket o’ chicks and he, being a bit of a softy himself, gave in to my pleas to rescue a few.  13 to be exact.  13 because we needed one of each color.  There are so many beautiful chickens.  You city folks have no idea!

The farm store tries to make sure they are all hens but this is not always an exact science.  So, you just hope when you bring home 13 sweet little chicks that they all turn out to be hens because roosters are the devil. 

Roosters are seriously awful creatures.  They are like tiny velociraptors with switch blades on their feet.  True gangsters.  They hate you even if you save them from the bucket at the farm store and love them and hand-feed them and raise them in a beautiful place.  Ungrateful bastards, they are.

We brought our 13 chicks home and put them in a big metal container with a warming light.  Then we kept them in Granny’s tiny cottage with her.  She enjoyed having them. My mom/Granny, was equally as crazy for the animals as me.  You see, I inherited my crazy animal hoarding behavior from my sweet mom. It was also a good plan to have them at Granny’s because that way we didn’t have to deal with Gizzy, our cat, bothering them and Dave didn’t have to put up with me fussing over them all day long.

They grew fast.  We played with them a lot.  Being city folks, the novelty of the baby chicks didn’t get old.  They were fun.  They all had different personalities, and some were super sassy. 

One day when I checked on them in the morning, one had gotten its eye pecked so I had to care for that one so it didn’t get infected.  I felt bad for the little cutie but later realized that it was an aggressive little monster and that’s why it got its eye pecked. 

Later, we realized that this aggressive little hen was actually a rooster. We named him Dusty.

Even though we figured out that he was a rooster, we kept him because how bad can a rooster really be, right?  I mean they are just little birds.

We named all the chickens fantastic names to match their adorable personalities.

Mick Jagger, Dusty, Phyllie, Pokey Dot, Flame, Reeses, Oreo, Freckles.

We moved them out with the goats when they got big enough.

I put Gavin out with the Goats, too!

Is there anything cuter than a really bad home video with Gav & Goats?

It turned out, as the chickens got older and it became obvious what sex they were, that we had 3 stinking roosters.  Mick Jagger, Dusty and Flame.  In the beginning, Mick Jagger was the most aggressive.  Dusty was probably lower on the pecking order so he wasn’t as sassy. 

One day when the vet came to the farm with her daughter to castrate the goats, her daughter fell in love with Flame.  I told the vet to please take Flame home with her.  We did not need 3 roosters.  Her daughter was in 4H club and loved that rooster and entered him in contests because he was so pretty.  We were just so grateful to eliminate a rooster.

Then, when we moved from one farm to another, we left the monster, Mick Jagger, at the old farm by himself so he could torment the pit bull that lived there!  So, that took care of problem rooster number 2.

Dusty, who you’ll recall, seemed a bit less aggressive than the others, moved with us to our new farm as the solo rooster.  As it turns out, caring for 8 hens is a big job for 1 rooster and he became the most neurotic and aggressive monster of all.  Oh the stories we can tell about Dusty the Rooster.

Dusty was a stalker…

Dusty loved to torment our youngest, Sophia who absolutely hates birds.  He seemed to know this so he would camp out by the bus stop and wait for her to get home from high school like an evil stalker. 

As she got off the bus he would lurk behind rocks and bushes and charge at her with his switch blade talons.  It was truly the stuff of nightmares.  She would get off the bus and sprint down the very, very long road to the house, lugging her books and then dive in the front door by the skin of her teeth. 

That damn rooster would chase her the entire way.  It was like an evil game. In time, Sophia learned to outsmart the rooster and take the long route to the front door, (a 10 minute walk as opposed to 2 minutes) just to avoid Dusty the Terrorist Rooster.. 

Gavin thought Sophia’s fear of this awful bird was hysterical. He loved to make it worse, in true brotherly form.

One time, Gavin volunteered to drive Sophia to school. As he sat in the driver’s seat waiting for her, he saw Dusty lurking behind a flower pot, just waiting to make Sophia’s day in true, evil rooster style.  This made Gavin chuckle. So as Dusty quietly waited for Sophia to get just far enough out of the house, he charged at her causing her to scream and run full sprint toward the car.  Gavin, in true evil brother style, allowed Sophia to get just close enough to almost get her hand on the car and then pulled away making her run after the car as Dusty chased and jumped at her with his sword feet.  Why do brother’s like to tease sisters to the point of tears? 

Dusty wasn’t quite as bad with the rest of us but he was still pretty bad.

Most of us got attacked at one point or another…

Dave was just trying to enjoy his morning coffee and was subjected to a sneak attack

And poor Gizzy…another sneak attack.

We left rakes by every door so we could guard ourselves against his unwanted advances.  You could seriously smack him with a rake, and he would just keep coming at you. 

Chloe would wear her most attractive protective gear and don her weapon/rake, while shepherding the goats…Dusty was always lurking.

The important technique for avoiding attack was to avoid eye contact, never look scared and definitely not go near his hens.  He was so protective of his girls.

When we were building out a section of our house for my mom, Dave walked out to find one of the construction workers kicking Dusty from one end of the yard to another.  As Dave got closer he could see that Dusty actually got the best of the poor guy who had bloody shins from Dusty’s sneak attack.  Roosters are worse than rabid junkyard dogs.

The hens on the other hand are the most delightful gals.  They are funny and friendly and bring so much joy as you can see by the look of sheer elation on my niece Karsen!

And hens give you more eggs than you will ever need.  If you let them free range like we did, they even hide eggs around the yard so you can have a daily easter egg hunt.  Unless Dusty sees you approach the hiding place, then…watch out!

Sometimes they are too good at hiding the eggs and you end up with new baby chicks that you don’t need!  Once a sly hen dug a tunnel in a 10 foot tall stack of hay bales.  When we discovered her hide-out we found that she was sitting on 63 eggs.  It seems that most of the hens were dumping their eggs in this secret hiding place. 

I mean…that’s kinda smart, don’t you think?  If the humans keep taking your eggs when you’re trying to make baby chicks, it can really cramp your style.  So, you get smart and create a secret egg zone and all your hen sisters hide their soon to be babies in the safe zone. 

Too bad we outsmarted them or we could have had 60 new chickens!  Such clever gals.

At our new property, we had a fabulous chicken coop complete with 8 individual little private egg laying boxes.  The chickens had a ladder to get to their high place to roost and the doors to the coop  had a slide lock.  Safe, right? 

Nope.  Raccoons are intelligent thieves and can open Fort Knox, apparently. Just when my sweet girls had gotten all cozy in their new home and gotten the hang of their egg laying, in one fell swoop, the raccoons got into our chicken coop and ate half of our chickens.  Nature is brutal.

HEART BROKEN. 

In a matter of days they got everyone else, except for my genius chicken, Pokey Dot.  My lone survivor. She has now survived as the lone Hen for 3 years by hanging out with the goats and booking it for cover when she senses danger.

I have lots of stories to tell you about my smart chicken, Pokey-Dot. Later though…this post is way too long. Apparently I have lots to say about chickens!

Stay tuned for more Chicken Fun with Pokey!