Chickens in the Spring

Our chickens have been loving the warm weather so I took the opportunity to take some nice pictures of them outside. If you remember from a previous post, we have some "top hat" chickens with feathers on top of their heads. They have grown into some of the funniest looking chickens ever...and oh SO friendly! They follow us around and ask to get pet. Granted if you're holding the chickens scrap bucket walking across the yard, it IS a bit disturbing to see 30 chickens following you. I mean, I KNOW they are harmless (well they are now that our attack rooster is no longer) but it's kinda creepy!

This is "Don King"

This is the sweetest and prettiest chicken I have EVER seen. I don't think I've ever seen her eyes. She has feathers on her feet too. If you hold her, she doesn't want you to put her down. Such a sweetie.

A Rhode Island Red. She actually looks silly to me without feathers on her head!

This picture is deceiving. This one is actually the smallest most petite chicken I've ever seen.

This one was actually really hard to get a picture of because she is SO friendly. I'd crouch down to take a picture and she would come right up in my face. I needed a macro lens for her, haha.

This is Manuka. She's our miracle chicken. We had 6 chicks we hatched last spring. They were actually way overdue (kind of like my kids, haha). They had gone past the 21 day incubation and we had no chicks. We had a big power outage part way through their incubation and we assumed they weren't going to hatch. at all. So at 5 days overdue we had to go out of town for two days. When we came back there were 2 chicks in the incubator! I freaked out and was running around screaming that we had to make a "home" for them and get them out. Over the next couple days we ended up with 6 total chicks. Over the summer they were let outside into a little fenced area. Our dog was completely obsessed with them. This is a dog who never cared about chickens before but something about these 6 made her crazy. They got a little bigger and were released into the coop. Not long later one disappeared. Then we found one half dead laying behind the coop with the dog over her licking her. We weren't sure if she had done it or found her and was licking her to nurse her. A couple days later as I'm finishing up the dinner dishes, my oldest boy comes running inside yelling that the dog bit the head off a chick. He had witnessed a headless chick fly out of the coop and the dog jump out behind it chasing it. Needless to say we weren't so happy about that. She was only allowed out supervised after that. But she did occasionally get let out by a kid or run up in the woods so we would lose track of her. With 4 kids the dog isn't always a priority. She ended up getting 2 more of the chicks. The one above was the last of that group of chicks. We protected her like crazy. I always called her Honey. She was so friendly. She had lost all her "friends" so we were her new friends. She followed us everywhere and would come running if she saw us come out of the house. Since she was our Miracle Chick, I changed her name to Manuka (manuka honey is a special kind of honey from New Zealand that has healing properties). She is still very friendly!