Good morning! Here they come! It rained so hard last night that there’s mud everywhere. Everyone seems hungry today. Natsu has gotten big, and is very smart and gets along well with the chickens.
By coincidence, we have three different kinds of chicks at our house right now, so today I’d like to show you how their bodies differ.
1. Wild chicks
First, in our familiar chick box: wild chicken chicks. So cute! A chick with a big, fluffy back of the head is probably a rooster, while one with a small, sleek back of the head is usually a hen. (This one is a bit ragged, so not the best example.) These came from a chicken-trapping site — six of them.
2. Komugi and Koishi
Next, the “rocket launcher team,” who have been dying to get out. I think this one’s parent is a game chicken, a breed kept for fighting. Compared with the wild chicks, the legs are longer. The head points down in a sleek, streamlined shape — built for fighting. A normal chick looks more upright and perky.
This is Komugi, currently on a rampage, about 10 days old. Next to him is a chick I found lost on the grounds of an animal welfare group, origin unknown. A friend tried to give it a lovely Hawaiian name, but I asked what it meant, and it was “stone.” So now we have Komugi and Koishi — “Wheat and Pebble.”
Koishi has a lot of wild chicken blood. Komugi’s head is streamlined, but Koishi’s is bumpy and fluffy. At nearly the same age, one is clearly bigger, with longer legs. The toes are thin and small — very subtle.
3. Chubby egg-layer chicks
And these chubby ones arrived just ten minutes ago. (Stop eating poop!) The neighbor’s egg-laying Leghorn hen escaped next door and had a secret rendezvous with the rooster beyond that. Eggs appeared, we thought she wasn’t sitting on them, but she was — and lots of chicks hatched. My guess: some are half Easter Egger, half Leghorn; the odd yellow-brown ones are probably half Buff Orpington; the rest look Leghorn-ish.
Compared with the wild chicks, their legs are really thick, and their bodies are wide. Outrageously chubby — so cute! They have no wariness at all, even though they were just taken from their mother. They’re improved breeds, so they’ll probably grow very big. There are 11 in all.
If you keep chickens, please manage them so eggs don’t hatch without you knowing. This is what happens! Usually the chicks we get are slim and sleek, so these are something new. Grow up healthy, okay?
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise!