At the risk of being cliche with the soap opera, there has been a good bit made lately about chickens being gateway livestock, where you talk silly with them, spoil them, and amass more and more birds, followed by new species. Sometimes for folks like us, as we do the daily walk around, we get a good laugh at the dramas unfolding around us: the hens in the big pen that didn't like their roo, and would try to dig under to get to the buff Brahma in the Brahma pen, the hen dead set against living in a pen, who when placed on a roost next to the big roo in the A pen late one night, became his inseparable best gal, and more.
As Wyatt Clay has been working on the heritage project, we chose to bring in 5 Buckeyes- all supposed to be pullets- as an experiment, to track the weights and see how they grew alongside the Brahmas he favored. In the end, we knew bringing in good birds meant that we were likely to have some pullet impostors- that is, young cockerels masquerading as pullets. And we did! As it would turn out, there were three pullets and two cockerels, and one of the pullets suddenly passed away right around the age of maturity.
As the birds would grow, and the dominance of one cockerel emerged, the other cockerel wanted to be in the pen, but was consistently run out by the dominant one. I don't even know how he was getting out of the pen, but initially we would find him hanging out nearby, then he soon started hanging out with the geese or the phoenix holdouts, the ones who keep sneaking out of the pens to live in the tree, and I am building a new double gated pen for.
Clearly, I have spent WAY TOO MUCH time teaching fitness in HOT aerobics rooms, and coming home to home school and clean and manage the plants and animals! But this came to mind, and here it goes...
...................................................................................
Young Bucky was trying hard to forget Mahogany, but try as he might, she was right there, standing beside TallBoy and Roja every time he rounded the buck pen or wandered into the goose pen to sneak black oil sunflower seeds. And even when Mahogany clucked or chortled at him, she was quickly gathered back by TallBoy, and she never stood up to TallBoy, never seemed to protest for long being just another of his "girls". Oh, but if Mahogany has been Bucky's girl, it would have been different...
No, Bucky couldn't think about that now. He heard the boy caretaker who brought the food and cleaned the water and housing talk about hatching some more hens, and trying to put them all in a different pen where they could learn to get along, but Bucky couldn't think about that either.
Then the cute little birchen hen ran past. Bucky couldn't help himself, he chased after her, round and round the Silkie area, past the crazy d'Uccles and overly laid back bantam Cochins, until he caught up to her. Almost as soon as he had, she was off again, rushing back to that goofy Phoenix boy, Junior. But Mahogany didn't have to know that part.
When Bucky swaggered back, trying to look proud of himself, and as though he didn't need anything as a big boy of the farm, he tried to decide whether Mahogany was actually jealous, or whether she seemed to realize that Bucky was putting on airs. Bucky put his beak in the air, and strutted off, noticing Mahogany doing much the same. "Maybe she really does care," Bucky thought to himself, maybe if he just held out a little longer...
No comments:
Post a Comment