Hello from Chicken Paradise — it’s me and Pen-chan, under a blue sky. Today is our 10th video!
A tour of the coop
To celebrate, a room tour! The coop building at the new farm is new, but the nest boxes and feeders are ones we’ve used for three years, cleaned up and brought along, so please excuse a little dirt.
The chickens sleep on the perches, then drink at the table, eat on the floor, and lay in the nest boxes. I placed the boxes so neither the morning nor the evening sun shines into them, because hens like to lay somewhere dark. Laying right now, from the left: Black Tiger, the orange hen Bug 2, and Balloon. Watching from above is Trumpet, a rooster who’s always on guard. Shizuku came by too, and there’s a little squabble.
The coop floor is connected to the soil, so microbes break the droppings down into nutrients we use as garden fertilizer. Cut grass and branches go in, the chickens mix it all up, and the cycle repeats.
The room for our small rescue birds is the same size, but with smaller nest boxes, because hens are picky about nest size. Yet they lay lots of eggs in the dark corner under the table instead. The leader here is Heart. He’s a rooster, but we call him Heart-chan anyway.
Dolly’s favorite tree
This tall tree is a haole koa, a tree Dolly loves to eat. Someone brought it to Hawaii back when many people from other countries started arriving, and now it’s a weedy nuisance. It’s tall and thin because Dolly has eaten all the lower leaves, so she’s thrilled when I bend it down or cut it for her. She strips it bald, but it’s very tough: let it spring back and new shoots appear in about a week. An endless loop of tasty leaves.
The 10-chicken challenge
Can I hold ten chickens at once, counting the tiny ones? With the little ones, my limit was four. Then I tried the big ones… I couldn’t find a gentle one, ran out of hands, and Turmeric refused to take part. Limit: three.
Meet Chico
Chico was a chick a friend found peeping in the bushes while out walking. He’s one of our smallest roosters, but very strong: he was number three in his room, then won a fight and moved up to number two. Lots of small hens adore him. His trademark is the odd puff of feathers on the back of his head; there’s a breed like that, so I think one is somewhere in his family tree.
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii. Bye-bye!