It’s me and Dolly today.
Pumpkin is in egg-laying position, pushing with everything she’s got. Go on! It’s taking a while… Afterwards she looked completely dazed. Good job, Pumpkin, and thank you.
Today’s Dolly
It’s raining again, so Dolly is inside her shelter. For some reason her back legs and front legs look really far apart. What are you doing? (Me? I’m just filming.) What a funny face. That was another rainy-day Dolly.
Garden check
A few weeks have passed and the lettuce is huge. One plant is a bit sad, but this one looks beautifully lettuce-like. It’s romaine, the long, narrow kind. Looking good!
The cucumbers have flowers — wait, lots of them! One, two, three, four, five, with more about to open. Already! Cute little yellow flowers. At last we’ll have cucumbers again this year. Everyone? …Nobody’s listening.
Next, some bug-catching for the little ones. I gathered a pile of pill bugs, mostly by hand — and some big ones too. Want them? Really? They tore them right out of my hand. Ouch! Ginny, are you going to eat them all? The slower chicks missed out, and the rest were carried off and eaten with a crunch.
One of the chicks has a strange habit: when I pick it up and set it down, it walks backward. Yesterday it backed up about 15 cm and I was shocked, but today it barely backed up at all. It’s slowly getting better. Phew!
Meet Shachi
The hen who started off the chicken corner is sitting on eggs and grumpy, so let’s ignore her. When Shachi was little she had white dots around her face, which reminded me of an orca (shachi in Japanese), so that became her name. She’s the younger sister of Iruka.
Her eyes and face are just like her mother’s. Chickens are famous for scary eyes, but Shachi has brown eyes and a gentle-looking face. (She is not gentle at all.)
Her mother’s story is a little sad. She hatched and raised three broods of chicks in a row, and it wore her down until her health broke. She got sour crop, an inflammation of the crop, the pouch where a chicken stores food before digesting it. When she weakened I caught her to try to help, but it was already too late, and she passed away. The two chicks with her then were Shachi and the rooster Iruka. They’re what she left behind, so I raised them with extra care.
Their mother was the older sister of Pen-chan, the first chicken I ever kept, so Shachi is Pen-chan’s niece. It’s interesting that they’re related.
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii! See you in the next video.