Good morning! It’s me and Marron. It’s raining, but the chicks are out anyway.
The chickens don’t care — they’re dust bathing as usual, except today it’s a mud bath. The chicks found dry spots.
Is that a feather on Star’s head?
Someone asked in the comments whether the thing on Star’s head is feathers. The short answer: everything that grows on a bird is a feather, so yes.
Hair grows on mammals, and each one is a single strand. A feather has a shaft down the middle with lots of fibers growing out to the sides, and those fibers lock together like a zipper. They can come apart and hook back together, so when a bird preens with its beak, messy feathers go back into shape.
Star’s head feathers have the same line down the middle and fibers along the sides, but the fibers don’t hook together much, so they look a bit shaggy.
A tiny new arrival
This chick hatched just yesterday. It was peeping and crying loudly right outside the front door of the apartment where we live. I think its mother decided it wouldn’t make it and left it behind. It moves oddly — forward, backward, wobbling — so I suspect it didn’t get quite enough nutrition in the egg. But its voice is extra loud, as if it wants to live, and since we met like this, I decided to take it in.
It weighed only 24 grams when I found it — the smallest chicken we’ve ever taken in, matched only by the very first one we rescued. Next to it, Marron looks huge.
See the little upward bump on the tip of its beak? In America it’s called an egg tooth. Before hatching, a chick taps at the shell with it until the shell breaks. It falls off a few days after hatching, so you can only see it now. I don’t know if this little one will make it, but I’ll watch over it.
Meet Toast
Toast is a sister of Opal and Flare, who I introduced before. Like them, she came from a breeder where the wrong breed got mixed in by mistake; they didn’t want her, so I took her.
Toast has big round eyes and is a real foodie, so I wanted a food name — and she looked like burnt bread. She’s older than she looks, and she’ll march up to big chickens, pick a fight and win. To look bigger she puffs her wings out with a funny swoosh, but today she refused to show us. She lays small but very pretty blue eggs.
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii! See you in the next video.