Hello from Chicken Paradise Hawaii — Marron is with me, and it’s a blue-sky day. Last night, for the first time, these little ones stayed at the farm on their own. How was it? They’re extra clingy.
I opened their door a different way than usual. Spice figured it out first — smart! Sugar too. Pepper was the third-smartest… and then climbed on me. I am not a tree. Salt came out next, and Ilima needed a little help finding the way.
The cockroach scramble
I caught two cockroaches that had gotten stuck in the feed container and couldn’t get out. I think the thin one is a male and the fat one a female. They’re ordinary house cockroaches, but since they were out here where there’s nothing around, they probably weren’t carrying anything. People think cockroaches are dirty, but I’ve heard they have no germs inside their bodies, unlike us; germs only stick to the outside, so one that hasn’t walked anywhere dirty is fine. (Humans, please don’t eat them.)
The chickens went wild. The first one ended with Black Tiger eating it. For the second, meant for the little ones, Purin snatched it first. Then Wakame chased it down, Mikan grabbed it, and Kuromame stole it away and ate it. Purin, who spotted it first, came away with nothing.
Chicken cleaning crew
We use fermenting bedding in the duck house, and it needs to be stirred regularly. Ducks don’t dig, and they spill huge amounts of water, so it gets very mucky. Bugs breed there and help break it down, but sometimes there are too many. So I send in a crew of chickens: they eat the bugs and dig and mix the bedding. I don’t lift a finger, and the duck house gets clean. Two birds with one stone — fitting, for birds.
Meet Wamekuko
Wamekuko’s name means “the one who screams,” and it fits exactly — catching her for this interview took effort, and she screamed. Her wing feathers point outward for some reason (they’re not broken), and her neck feathers grow the other way, in a swirl. I think some frizzle genes, a type of curly feathering, are mixed in somewhere.
She has been small since she was a chick and still is. Whenever anything happens, she screams. Once, when the flock went through a phase of pecking each other’s tails and pulling out feathers, she screamed the moment anyone touched hers — so everyone learned to leave her alone, and she was the only one who kept a full tail. Despite all that, she’s popular and gets along well with the other chickens.
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise! See you next time.