Good morning! Someone is outside the playground, and someone’s inside it too.
Cats and chickens together
Are cats and chickens okay together? They don’t care about each other at all, though the chickens are making their warning calls, just in case.
Here are Shiratama and friends, perched up high because they’re scared of the older hens. Everyone is eating nicely. The soil inside the coop is in good shape lately, and as always, this one spot is crowded even though it’s so small.
A dust-bath demonstration
Our Marshmallow kindly demonstrated a dust bath. When a chicken finds good dirt in a good spot, she says, “Ooh, nice,” lies down and starts bathing in it. Lots of people say that the first time they saw it, they thought the chicken had fainted and was having a fit. In the evening, everyone comes to claim a good spot. The ladder has fallen over, but it makes a nice play area, so I’ve left it. Chickens love high places, and Pachita loves being on top of people.
Meet Pachita
Pachita is our very newest arrival. Her name is apparently Spanish for something small, though I was told it’s not quite the right usage.
She was found on a rainy day in the middle of an intersection, trying to climb a curb, falling back, climbing, falling back again. The person who found her kept her ever since, so I was told she’s about six months old. Aren’t you a bit small for that? And she’s a real chatterbox.
She spent those six months living indoors, so she loves people but knows nothing about chickens. She’s breaking every rule of the flock, which has made things a little chaotic. She has to learn to be a chicken from scratch: chicken on the outside, human on the inside, just like Pen-chan and Min-min.
Her former owner lived on one of Hawaii’s military bases. Military families have to move every few years, with detailed rules about which pets can come along. Chickens often can’t, sometimes not even dogs, so pets get left behind in Hawaii more often than they should. Pachita got caught up in one of those moves. She lived indoors, and suddenly it’s “Wait, this is outside? And there are so many chickens!”
She’d been eating unusual food, so first she practiced eating chicken feed, then the mash we make here. Lately she gets some free time alone in her room. She’s very curious and very attached to people. Welcome, Pachita!
Chickens are cute! Thanks for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii.