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Controversial new branding for the Myrtle Canyon egg op. Some feel the busty louche hen is not befitting the dignity of the species. But I calls them like I sees them.
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Baffled by a live crayfish from 99 Ranch Market, en route to a boil. "Can I eat it, or will it eat me?": the dualism at the heart of all chicken ontologies.
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Exhausting, getting yourself out of an egg. This is about how I felt after I left my last job.
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Andrea and her babies. I could never tell my four Rhodies apart, but when this one went broody I named her for a certain friend of mine in Berkeley, another redhead with powerful maternal instincts.
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Clockwise from fg: White Ameraucana, Light Brahma, Polish. As I upload this, 2 months out now, the haughty puffball at front is tracking to be ultimate bitch queen of the roost. You could see it coming already when they were day-olds. Biology = destiny.
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An Araucana that died at about gestation age 18 days (out 21). Those last days before hatch are a high mortality period, as the chicks switch over from yolk to air breathing. The little bird snug in its caul was weirdly, placidly, beautiful.
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There's some hens patiently await their turn at a nest. But others barge in and lay right beside the growling incumbent. (L-R: Barred Rock, Black Sex Link)
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Old fire pump in front of chicken coop. Prolly hasn't run for 25 years; here's to hoping we don't need it anytime soom.
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Pablita the Ameraucana demonstrates how chickens sunbathe. It seems very important to them to even out the tan on their legs.
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Jerzy the Crested Polish rooster (named for Kosinski, for being small, intense, and sexually ambitious). His crest is always bloody and mangled because the demure hens will reach around and rip out his top feathers when he tries to mount them.
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Cuckoo Marans rooster. Though well turned out and twice the weight of pipsqueak Jerzy, Rocky is completely subordinate, and is batting zero with the ladies. Conventional attractiveness trumped by wile and persistence, again.
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One of the nameless Rhodies caught her left leg in the teeth of a garden rake today. The three low status roosters took advantage of her immobility to gang-rape her; it's about the only way they can get any. When I rescued her, that leg was dangling limp.
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I spent a couple hours googling for veterinary info. Not much out there, but I know a hundred times more about musculo-skeletal anatomy than when I started. My hen's symptoms are consistent with all five of the tendons passing through her heel being torn.
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A budgie fancier's site indicated that immobilizing that joint for 3-4 weeks is about all you can do for a bird with this condition. Even then you don't know if the tendons will ever mend. I improvised supplies from the craft store, and my closet.
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Backcountry veterinary technology: here I've used duct tape to fashion the coat hanger into a an L configuration; this splint will make the cast more rigid. The craft store plaster cloth is ready to be cut and soaked.
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The patient is brought to the operating theater (my kitchen table). She is so calm and stoic! Some of that's maybe due to pain and shock, but I swear sick chickens know when you're trying to help them, and they make things easy for you.
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Chicken checks out her new cast. I'm no Marcus Welby but I've seen much sketchier work done on humans in third world hospitals (ask me about events relating to a motorcycle, an ex-girlfriend, and Phnom Penh)
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Post-op ward = my bathtub. She ate half a boiled egg from my hand and nodded off just after this shot. Most birds don't survive this sort of crippling injury, but this little red hen gots some spirit in her, so fingers crossed.
