Good morning from Chicken Paradise Hawaii! Another blue sky, and a little hot today. Today’s chicken is Pen-chan, the very first chicken I picked up.
Where Pen-chan came from
Her feathers are very fluffy, so I think one of her grandparents was a Silkie; her mother’s face, comb and legs were all black. Her father was an ordinary orange-ish rooster with polka dots on his breast. I think they came from a nearby neighborhood where many people keep chickens. They were wild chickens, and sadly they’re no longer alive. Pen-chan seems to have been born weak, and her mother abandoned her. Pen-chan is here because I happened to find her.
Raising a chick in an apartment
I’d never touched a chicken. To give her water, I held her face up and touched a drop to her beak. Once she perked up, she was convinced I was her mother and screamed whenever I left her sight — in an apartment! I couldn’t even bathe without perching her on the edge of the tub.
Until she was bigger, she slept in a cage so I wouldn’t roll over on her, and putting her to sleep could take an hour, sometimes two hours of screaming. Later, when I asked, “Want to sleep on the futon with me?” she’d come running and plop onto my stomach. We still sleep together.
Natsu settles in
Natsu, our new farm cat, is getting used to this place and becoming more active, and Pen-chan seems to recognize her as family. Can cats and chickens live together? So far, so good!
Meet Pen-chan
After moving into the coop and laying lots of eggs, she seems to have run short on calcium, and when a rooster mounted her, her thigh bone broke. Few vets see birds, and the care didn’t go well: after three surgeries it healed soft, broke again when she jumped down from somewhere, and set at an odd angle. She limps a little but is fine — I lower her down by hand.
Once she knew she could live in the house, she turned hostile to other chickens. She’s roughly a quarter Silkie, a quarter fighting breed and half Hawaiian wild chicken, and very tough, so she rarely goes into the coop. She won’t eat ordinary feed either: every morning I make her a paste of baby-parrot formula. It’s expensive, you know!
People ask if she’s a rooster because of her big comb, but she’s a girl; her comb grows with age, like a queenly crown. She turned four on June 22. Wild chickens usually live two or three years, so she’s done well.
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise! See you in the next episode.