Good morning from Chicken Paradise Hawaii! Another gloomy, cloudy day. The weather has been so bad that I’m a little worried the bananas aren’t growing well.
Where did the moms go?
These are Donut’s chicks, but Donut is nowhere to be seen. She slept with them until this morning, then suddenly decided her mothering was done. The chicks have no idea what happened: “Mom, where did you go?” Mike-chan the cat, did you hear anything? No?
And Ishiko, who was raising chicks at the same time, is missing too. She also slept with her chicks last night. It seems the two moms ended at the very same moment. Shimako the cat came back, so I asked her as well. No answer.
The youngsters can’t just roam free yet, so, like Sona’s and Karaage’s chicks before them, they’re going to “kindergarten.” There are 19 in all: 11 from Donut (the smaller orange ones) and 8 from Ishiko (the black-and-white ones and the bigger brown ones). They hatched only about a day apart and grew up side by side, so they’re settling in calmly. Their sizes differ and there are both roosters and hens, so we’ll keep a close eye out for bullying. They’re all nicely plump, and a few have mild colds, nothing that needs medicine.
Donut finished about two weeks before the usual two months, but her chicks are all healthy. And Ishiko? She turned up inside the play yard. The fence is there to keep dangers out, but there must be a hole somewhere, so I’ll go look for it.
Egg hunt and fluffy hens
Poppy is an Easter Egger, maybe about five. A friend’s Easter Egger stopped laying at around four, but ours keep going, just not every day. In the little ones’ room, someone lays plain white eggs right on the ground, and someone else likes the tight space under the table, which makes collecting tricky.
Older hens like Cho, Bonbori, Hachimitsu and Black Tiger only lay now and then. That leaves more nutrition for their bodies, so in this cool season their feathers are wonderfully fluffy. Nishiki, the rooster with them, seems more protected by the hens than protecting them. Mint has turned grey with mud: the farm is said to sit on an old riverbed, so the soil is a dark, clay-like grey instead of Hawaii’s usual red dirt.
The spring roosters
Ryu, born this spring, is looking grand. Two long, curved tail feathers are a rooster trademark, and his neck feathers matter too: he raises them like a frilled lizard in a fight. Haku is very white, with a slightly shorter tail and smaller comb than Ryu’s.
Thanks for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii. See you next time!