It’s me and Marron, under another blue sky.
What’s up with your feathers, Iruka?
For some reason Iruka has feathers sticking out on both sides. What happened? Are they falling out? Did you get into a fight?
New nest boxes
Thanks to our new-recruit squad, the nest boxes are in a total traffic jam: four birds squeezed into one room, and a fifth trying to get in. That’s not OK, so I decided to build new nest boxes underneath the old ones.
Each current box is about 20 cm by 20 cm, and with the gaps the whole row comes to 120 cm. The spot for the new row is a little shorter, 110 cm, so the new rooms are slightly smaller. I picked pieces from our pile of scrap wood. There’s a wall behind, so the boxes don’t need a back. The result: five boxes of roughly 20 cm each.
Kin-chan got furious while I installed them. Please don’t be mad! For bedding I used wood shavings. They’re soft and smell wonderful, and insects dislike that smell, so it helps keep bugs and germs away too. Shavings are so light they blow around, but soon it was nice and fluffy.
To show the hens what the boxes are for, I took an egg Kin-chan was sitting on and put it in, as if someone had just laid it. Lavender helped out: she climbed in, rolled the egg around and seemed satisfied.
Five new rooms at last — thank you for waiting, and sorry it took so long! Then I opened them up for everyone who wanted to lay. More and more hens noticed and went in… but in the end, plenty still squeezed into the upper boxes. The popular boxes stay popular no matter what. Please spread out!
Meet Lilac
This is Lilac, Lavender’s little sister — or just sister? I honestly can’t tell which is older. Like Lavender, she was left unsold at a shop, and I took her home for a low price.
Lilac is plumper than Lavender (I’m not sure why) and more comfortable with people. Same attitude, though: small but feisty. She often picks fights with much bigger chickens and gets hurt, and the other day she finally had her comb torn off. She doesn’t seem bothered at all. You scare me!
Lilac is an Old English Game Bantam too, in speckled blue, but with less of the blue mottling — a little paler. That’s how I tell them apart. Otherwise even their face shapes are almost identical. Lookalikes!
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii! See you in the next episode.