Good morning, everyone! A bit of good news to start: our banana plant has a new shoot.
Dolly strikes again
The cucumbers I was looking forward to? Dolly ate them. Are you the culprit, Dolly? She just keeps chewing in silence. The broccoli has fallen over, and the tomatoes are down to bare stems — they’d been flowering, too. All that’s left of the cucumber I planted back in Episode 5 is a vine with no leaves.
I thought I’d protected the garden. It turns out that when we expanded the playground, this fence came loose. Nothing to do but replant. A farmer gets back up, again and again!
Meet Shiro
Today’s chicken is Shiro (“white”). We call him Shiro, but he’s a rooster. He’s so white — beautiful, isn’t he?
Shiro was found in the parking lot of the apartment where I live. He was about a month old, a mid-sized chick, and both of his eyes were closed. When I looked closely, there were worms in his eyes. Hawaii has a parasite called eyeworm, carried by cockroaches, and just as the name says, it lives in the eye. It made his eyes so itchy that he’d been scratching at them himself. He was in no state to keep up with his mother, so I took him in.
I gave him eye drops — very painful ones — for about a week, and he got much better. His sight slowly came back and he became fairly healthy. But he had to stay still for so long that one leg was left bent, like a sideways V. It doesn’t stop him walking, though he’s a bit slow. I worried what might happen as he got heavier, but he seems fine now.
Much later, as a grown rooster, he seems to have fought with one of our other roosters, and he lost the sight in one eye. If you come at him from that side, he gets startled. Shiro, you’ve really had it rough. But he’s doing well now.
Shiro grew up with three others who happened to be hens: Wakame, Kombu and Sango. But after his leg trouble he spent time in a small isolation cage, and it seems he no longer remembers who they are. Right now he’s happily eating. He was found right by the road, where he could easily have been hit by a car. I’m glad he’s here.
Thanks for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii. See you next time!