Our girls are huge, it seems! As far as chickens go, they are actually on the small side, but they have just grown so much, so quickly.
Once they made it out of the awkward teenager stage, they began to look totally different. Nugget is the fluffy-cheeked blonde, while Mimosa’s rocking the red mohawk. She looks a bit suspiciously roosterlike, but she’s definately a hen. Both of these ladies are supposedly Easter Eggers, but we think Mimosa is crossed with Rhode Island Red- her appearance and blush eggs are my clues, but I’m really just learning from Google over here.
I can’t even believe I actually feel this way about chickens, but they are really cute. They are adorably codependent- they follow each other all over the backyard and will call for each other if separated. They are especially adorable dust bathing – they fluff up and shake and roll and it’s pretty precious.
To be honest, apples aren’t falling far from the tree over here. These girls are assertive and opinionated, for sure! They’re more often that not a bit big for their britches- Nugget is happy to help herself to a snack, and seems very intent on roosting as high as possible in the yard, ideally on top of their cabin.
Sometimes they’re super cuddly, and other times they are having absolutely none of it, and will go squawking away. The chicken jailbreaking actually got a little out of hand for a bit, with frequent uninvited visits to the neighbors. Nugget even went for a brief swim in the neighbors pool, till David hopped the fence on lifeguard duty.
So to limit the chicken capers, we had a little wing trim session. I watched a few YouTube videos, and it was quick, easy, and totally painless to trim their flight wings so they can’t make it over our (rather tall) fence. You can spot Mimosa’s haircut in the above pictures if you look carefully…. it’s not exactly super even!
But I think the naughtiest thing that happened was the egg hidey-hole situation. After the first few eggs from Mimosa, and just one aqua egg from Nugget, they went on an apparent strike- no eggs for over a week. After a literal egg-hunt in the backyard, we found a dozen and a half eggs hidden in the wild sage!
Their eggs are pretty tiny- above with a quail egg, and an xl white store egg for a comparison. At first, some barely tipped the egg scale, but nowadays most are almost or into medium sized.
They’re obviously richly colored compared to the store egg, and stunningly more tasty. They make the most incredible carbonara, and scrummy fried eggs, and everything else. We feed the girls organic layer feed, lots of kitchen scraps, and plenty of treats and grit, so these are some spoiled chicks.
I’m clearly obsessed with these girls, so bonus windblown chicken picture (how hysterical are they?) if you made it through all this chicken chat!
LoveRavayna
