Hello from Chicken Paradise Hawaii — Chako is with me today, under a blue sky. Chicks, open! Bee, out of the way — ouch, heavy, and dirty!
Our baby pigeon, Happy
Remember the baby pigeon from our YouTube Shorts? It has grown a little and is flapping around now. And it has a name: since it always comes over looking so happy, I named it Happy.
Pigeons feed their babies something called pigeon milk. The parents make this sticky, nourishing, milk-like liquid in their throat, and the baby pushes its beak into the parent’s beak to drink it. That’s different from what most of us picture for baby birds. A typical baby bird opens its mouth wide, so you just put food in. A baby pigeon wants to push its beak into something, so you have to feed it differently. Give it a narrow gap and it wants to poke its beak in — though Happy refused to show you today.
Happy is big enough now to want to peck at things, so I bought regular pigeon feed plus some fine grains for practice. I scattered the fine grains — “What’s that?” Happy took up the challenge, picking them up and tossing them around happily. Lots of practice ahead!
A dragonfly visitor
A dragonfly got caught in the netting of the chickens’ play area, so I picked it up. It’s quite big — does anyone know what kind it is? Its face is scary, but when I hold out my finger it clings on, which is cute. Dragonflies eat the flies that gather around here, so I’m very grateful to them. Off you go! It’s warming up before flying away.
Meet Cho
Cho means “butterfly.” As a chick, her markings looked like the butterflies you often see flying around Hawaii. She is very easygoing and never gets angry, whatever you do — though I suppose touching her neck might be too much.
Cho isn’t one of the twenty-something Easter Eggers I bought. She’s a Black Star, the same breed as Balloon and her group, but I got her at a different time, so she’s a little older. Sadly, she has lost one eye: parasites, illness and inflammation left it blind. Her other eye is fine, though, and she’s still busily scratching at the ground. She’s our energetic auntie now. She lays well — brown eggs, the standard kind.
Thank you, Cho, and thank you for watching Chicken Paradise! See you in the next episode.