Good morning! The air feels moist today.
Morning rounds
As always, there’s food waiting the moment everyone comes out. The little ones have little bottoms — so cute — and they all eat very well. I put the chicks out in the playground to soak up some sun.
Pen-chan always sleeps on top of the guinea pig cage. From up there you can see over the whole chicken coop: the best spot on the farm. Good morning, Fuyuto! Niji doesn’t do well in the cold, so I set up a place in the sun, and now that little mouth is full of grass. (Later I moved Niji to an even better spot.) The cat who just walked past was Madara.
Someone wants to touch the guinea pigs and is reaching a paw into their cage. The guinea pigs get hay for breakfast; Ao can’t join in. Fuyuto wants to touch the rabbits too… And now it’s Pen-chan’s breakfast time.
Meet Taro
This is Taro. His molt (when a chicken sheds and regrows its feathers) is finished, and when I let him out for a walk he was overjoyed.
Taro is three years old now and came to us as a chick. He had been left unsold at a store, and I bought him thinking he was a girl. He’s a Rhode Island Red… and later turned out to be a boy!
I raised him inside the house until he reached a certain size, so he’s very attached to me. He’s a bit of a clown and still acts like a chick. I put a link to his playlist in the video description, if you’d like to see more.
A monarch caterpillar
This is the caterpillar of a butterfly called the monarch. The adult monarch is orange with black lines and white dots — a rather stylish pattern — while its caterpillar wears these bold white, yellow and black stripes.
On the U.S. mainland, monarchs travel 3,000 kilometers to get through the winter. From all over America they fly as far as Mexico, wait out the cold there, and then lay their eggs.
Thanks for spending the morning with us at Chicken Paradise. See you next time!