This morning I visited someone who keeps goats to learn about them, so filming started in the afternoon. Then I absent-mindedly opened the coop, and the camera froze — so here are the chickens that are out!
Treats for Dolly
At the goat visit I was given an herbal dewormer that also works for hoofed animals like sheep, plus a seaweed supplement. I tasted both first: the seaweed is like furikake without salt; the dewormer is a fine, bitter, herbal powder.
Dolly snorted so hard at the seaweed that she blew half of it away, but finished it. She paused over the bitter dewormer, then ate it anyway and looked very satisfied.
A garden raider caught
We caught one of the culprits tearing up our garden: a very pretty, fluffy hen, probably a mix of an egg-laying breed and wild chickens. Hare-chan helped — while he was busy with her, I used the rough trick of pulling her out from underneath him.
Around here some people let chickens go on purpose, and there are lots of wild ones. A healthy hen like this can hatch around ten chicks at once and raise them all, so left alone, the numbers keep growing. Two more garden raiders to go!
Also, our blueberry is blooming — tiny, cute bells. Fingers crossed for fruit!
Layers vs. non-layers
A “layer” is, roughly, an egg-laying hen. Layers have big, solid bodies, and the fluffier the feathers around their rear, the better they lay — about 200–300 eggs a year. White Leghorns, with their floppy combs, lay the eggs you see in Japanese supermarkets.
Non-layers include fancy show breeds like Glico, bred for feather patterns, which lay about 180 eggs a year. Hawaii’s wild chickens lay only 20–30 a year, just to raise families — but when I keep collecting the eggs, they somehow lay about 100. And non-layers aren’t always smaller: Star is a non-layer rooster, and he’s as big as Cho, an ordinary layer.
There are also broilers for meat and game fowl for cockfighting. All come from the red junglefowl, a wild chicken from the Philippines that people caught and bred long ago. Like dogs, chickens come in many kinds.
Meet Mikan and Chobi
These sisters were found as tiny chicks — smaller than normal — in our apartment’s parking lot. It was pouring rain after dark when I heard peeping and found chicks scattered under a trash bin and beside a wall: these two, plus their older brothers.
Nicknamed “MikaChobi,” they’re always in the nest box together, squabbling and fighting over eggs. Their colors are totally different, but their eyes and combs are identical.
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise! See you in the next episode.