Here’s a quiet evening on the farm, and a look back at 2022.
An evening with the flock
Yukinko is working hard at laying eggs, and lately our egg count is going up again. Marshmallow seems to have hurt her leg, which worries me a little.
I get the food ready here because there’s water, but that means the ducks gather first and sneak bites. Trumpet has found a good spot: this shady corner is the hangout for the low-ranking birds. Is that Parsley saying something?
Heart, thanks for your hard work today. You too, Star. The young chickens are slowly growing up. Poppy 2 is pecking at the ground, looking for something, and the birds I call the prince and the princess come over, followed by their retainers.
Our dog Iroha loves this spot lately and asks everyone who walks by to play. He tries being a good boy, pretends to give up, then can’t help staring at the camera with sparkling eyes. It’s okay, we’ll go for a walk later.
Looking back on 2022
2022 went by so fast. It was our first year on this farm: I found this land in mid-February and moved in, built a chicken coop in a big hurry, ran into trouble when the chickens started fighting, fought illness… Go back further, and Chicken Paradise has come all this way since I picked up Pen-chan four years ago.
When we first moved here we had 83 chickens and about 20 quail. Since then we’ve grown to more than 200 birds. We aren’t adding quail now, so their numbers are slowly going down as they reach the end of their lives. I also started keeping lots of ducks, and we have pigeons, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits and tortoises. It has been a wonderful experience.
Many of our chickens came from the wild, and we often don’t know what they ate before or whether they had a chronic illness, so we’ve had to say sad, sudden goodbyes fairly often. Even so, we treasure every one alive today. My goal this year was for them to live happy, ordinary, relaxed lives for as long as they live.
Thank you
A little while after moving here, I started YouTube, wondering what on earth would happen. Thanks to your support, we made it safely to the end of the year. I’ll keep picking up and catching chickens from all sorts of places, and doing my best to help move Hawaii’s chicken problem toward a solution.
Our blooper reel grew this year, too, and Pen-chan is starting to get annoyed, so I’ll wrap up here. Thank you all, and see you next year!