Good morning from Chicken Paradise Hawaii. Another blue sky today.
A mother and six chicks
Around a friend’s house, for some reason, chickens keep hatching one after another. Complaints came in, and my friend was asked to do something, so I caught them and brought them here: a mother hen and her chicks. They might have some genes from my friend’s own chickens mixed in, so I’m a little excited.
They’re very scared, so I’m watching them quietly. There’s the mother and six chicks.
This is how wild chickens keep multiplying. Many people think they’re cute and feed a mother with chicks. Sadly, that raises the chicks’ survival rate, which becomes a real nuisance for people who don’t like rooster crowing or chicken poop — and in the end, it’s the grown-up chickens who get treated badly. So I don’t recommend feeding them.
Taking them out of the wild and keeping them somewhere else, though, is good support, I think. Then they won’t keep multiplying: I can collect any eggs the hen lays and manage things properly. So I took them. Then again, all six chicks are probably roosters, so egg-laying may not be much of a worry!
One of them is staring hard at the camera. Sorry to interrupt your dust bath! I hope they get a little more used to people.
Meet Satoshi
Today’s chicken is Satoshi, a rooster who appeared in our video about why chickens fight. He’s a fairly good boy. He’s on the small side, but his build looks like a fighting rooster’s, so I think he has some fighting blood in him. He’s very strong, and since he accepts every challenge no matter how much it hurts, he gets injured; I’m always telling him to stop.
I don’t know where he was found; someone at a chicken shop offered me a chick they’d picked up, and I said yes. A lost child (he says he doesn’t remember where). He’s named after a character in a YouTube video I happened to be watching.
He was my only chick that season and cried terribly at night, so I put his cage next to a male quail with an injured eye — we called him Father Quail. Seeing him, Satoshi relaxed and started sleeping on his own. But when the big scab on Father Quail’s eye suddenly fell off, Satoshi happened to see it, screamed, and didn’t move or eat for three days. I was afraid he might die. Then he recovered and ate next to Father Quail again. Father Quail is gone now, but Satoshi is doing well.
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii! See you in the next video.