Small space chicken football

I've always called it chicken football when one chicken finds an especially delicious morsel and takes off running, blocking the other chickens with her body, switching back and forth as the others try to snatch the food away. She can't stop and eat it until she finds a safe corner. The official, scientific term for this activity is "worm running."

Continuing with the indoor entertainment theme because it's miserably wet and cold outside, I offered the chicks meal worms today. Some people think snakes are gross? Take a look at meal worms. They have segments and bunches of wriggly legs and are just plain yuck, much worse than garden worms. To chickens they are filet mignon, carrot cake, potato chips--name your sinfully delicious fave and you'll get the idea.

Please take a moment to appreciate my heroism when I tell you I offered those horrid things in my bare hand.

Only people who are dotty about chickens make wild claims about their intelligence.  Chickens operate on hard-wired instinct and they are as smart as they need to be in order to learn to live a chicken's life. Some, I'm afraid, are slow. Like a normal chicken, Bazooka pecked at that object in my hand and ran with it while Maewest took a while to figure out (1) there was a food object (2) Bazooka got it and (3) she should try to get it. The next time I offered a meal worm to Maewest, Bazooka ran over and gobbled it while Mae was still considering what to do. After Bazooka ate three, she slowed down a little and Maewest got her treat.
So here's chicken football in the guest bathroom.

What friends think about when they think about me

A friend in Kentucky saw this and knew it was for me.

The package reads, "Grandpa says, 'If ya got dry lips, put chicken poop on 'em so you won't lick 'em!'"
I'm glad my grandpa never said that.

When you find a bird on the ground--

Fledging season arrived with shrieks last Saturday morning. After feeding the dogs and letting them out, I was fumbling through the coffee making ritual when I heard a cacophony of shrieks and screams. Thinking the dogs had caught a chicken, I ran outside barefoot and in PJ’s (aqua, with snowflake pattern) to wrestle them away from something on the ground by the fence.  Miro is now so strong that he can pull out of my grasp. He towers over Alanis and has the pulling power of a mine pony.

When I moved our dancing circus a few feet away from the prized object, I saw a Steller's Jay chick on its side, eye fixed and open, foot curled. My son crawled out from his basement hole to haul Miro inside while I dragged Alanis, who refuses to go indoors through the downstairs door, back up the gravel path and ouch-- I realized I had run down that path barefoot and had to walk back up on winter-tender feet.


This time I put on sandals before hurrying back outside. I picked up the “dead” chick to discover it was alive, in shock, and injured. The parent birds were still screaming overhead. If you click on the link above, you can hear some normal Steller sounds but not the ear-pounding, heart-thudding alarm calls which sound similar to a human mother screeching, "Get out of the road!" to her four-year-old child.

The jays were screeching at their rivals and enemies, the crows. The day before I had seen this pair mobbing a crow away to the opposite yard and now I knew why. Crows will eat other young birds and a fledgling in the nest or on the ground is crow food.

A fluttering drew my attention to the adjacent side of the fence and there was another jay chick flapping up and falling back down, unable to gain enough height to get on the 6-ft fence top. What to do first? Maybe if I could get the uninjured one up to a branch, he could figure out the rest while the parents yelled encouragement. I gently replaced the injured chick and stalked the other, catching him as he dove past me. Just as I was cupping my hands over him, he jumped away and into the bushes.

When a bird knocks into a window and is stunned, it will often recover and fly away if left alone. I suspected the chick on the ground had a leg or wing injury but I left it there, sneaking outside to check on it every few minutes. It sat up and moved a few inches farther into the shelter of the trees but showed no signs of hopping or fluttering like the other.  I didn't try for more than one photo in case the flash scared the bird even more than he was already. You can see that he's holding his wing at an angle and that all the flight feathers are in, though not fully grown.

The uninjured one got about five feet off the ground and hid in the butterfly bush. He would be able to fend for himself, if he lived long enough.Wild birds learn to fly from the ground, like the old-fashioned way of teaching a human child to swim by throwing him off the dock. The chick may spend up to a week on the ground while the parents feed it, watch over it, and shout encouragement. You can see why so few survive to adulthood.

I gathered his injured nestmate into a shoe box and drove him (or her) to PAWS wildlife center where I handed over the bird and a donation.
 
Over the next few days I heard outbreaks of the same shrieks coming from Guinevere the Great Dane’s yard. It has been quiet today and I am watching a blue shape flutter from branch to branch in an evergreen across the way, too far to tell if it’s a full grown bird or the youngster practicing his skills.  If something got it, the parents would have mobbed and dive-bombed the predator and uttered heartrending screams until the internal chemistry attaching them to the chick faded. Mourning would end and they would go on to the next task. I wish it were that simple for us.


Stellers Jays and crows are the dominant birds around here; they are not good news for songbirds. They eat songbird chicks and eggs and chase them from food sources. They are intelligent and tough survivors. The parent birds will undoubtedly raise a second clutch before the season is over. So why did I spend a morning and drive 30 miles to rescue a jay?
Because it was there.

Home is somewhere in those trees.

Nora goes walkabout again

I let the dogs out as usual and staggered toward the coffee maker like something out of The Mummy’s Curse. The morning’s fog was pierced by a too-familiar squawking and flapping. Imagining a tail-wagging dog holding a mouthful of writhing chicken, I dashed outside to find Miró on the deck, jumping happily, and Alanis below. Both came running at my call because they hadn’t had breakfast yet. Where was the source of the altercation?

I stuffed the dogs indoors and ran to the chicken pen in the lower yard. Edna was dancing around on top of the netting that covered the pen and Zora was nowhere to be seen.
A string holding the netting in place had broken, allowing tiny Zora and Edna to pop straight up in the air when Miró had run down and shocked them out of their morning stupor. I guessed that Zora had flown up to the deck, Miró in hot pursuit, and taken off from there.

It was easy to lure Edna back down with scratch feed scattered on the ground but neither rattling food in the cup nor the hens’ “I found food” chuckles lured Zora from her perch in the evergreens or the neighbor’s yard. Each time I let dogs out that day, I first checked for the return of the prodigal chicken. Finally at dusk, which is chicken bedtime, I heard the whining sound the banties make and a rattling in the evergreens. Out hopped Nora, running back and forth on the wrong side of the pen before figuring out how to find the door. Amazingly resilient, that bird.

Chicken chase

When chasing an errant chicken, you learn a lot about the neighbors. You don’t meet them all because no one who does not have to be outside at 7:15 on a freezing morning is going to be standing around to greet you.

I began by wasting natural resources driving out my street and down the next one over to the yard where Edsel—also known as “that f**$#@! fowl"-- had spent the night. I had seen her silhouette in the tree but by the time I got to the house, she had disappeared.

I discovered that the dog belonging to that house is huge. That is, the size of the poop is huge and it was all over the yard like land mines. These people should clean up more often. They did have lots of useful junk, including spare wood, bricks I could use to line the fence around the chicken pen to keep vermin out, and a shed that would make a great hen house if they'd just get all the junk out of it. Unfortunately, there were huge piles of debris at the back of the yard that Edsel, once I spotted her, ran up, down, and around while I stumbled after her, trying to catch her in the fishing net I had brought.

Finally she flew to the top of the fence and sat there, impervious to the pebbles I threw at her. I showed admirable self-restraint by not heaving a boulder. Because this yard was several feet lower than mine, the wood fence sat on top of a brick retaining wall that was about hip height. Fortunately there was a reinforcing pole that I used to haul myself up the few extra inches I needed before getting a foot on the wall, not an easy thing to do in clumsy rubber work boots.

When I stood there clinging to the pole, she gave a squawk and flew toward my yard. I jumped down, hoping I wouldn’t sprain anything, dashed to my car, dog poop and all, and drove back to my house. Did I mention that I was dressed for work except for the yard boots?

Since my neighbor on the west side was out scraping ice off his windshield, I explained that I needed to take a look in his back yard in case the chicken had gone there. No chicken but an unused dog kennel about 6x8x6 that could make a really nice chicken run. Maybe they want to get rid of it....

Then the neighbor and I had a little talk about the raccoon I reported on earlier. He said, “We sort of took care of it,” in that low-voiced manner people have when they're describing something not quite legal. I feared he was implying that they had set out poison.

I ran back to my yard and there was Edsel looking bewildered on a short deciduous tree. Pure luck. I bagged her in the net and put her in the hutch with Muffin, who is always easy to catch. Edsel complained about the whole thing. As if she had any right!

Next: Lockdown

Crested Polish Chickens

Polish chickens are like fluffy bobble-head dolls. Their heads dart around like those of regular chickens and their poof of head-feathers bobs in the opposite direction. One of mine has such thick feathers on her head that I'd have to lie prostrate on the ground and look up in order to see her eyes peering out from underneath.

For about a hundred years scientists argued about the relative intelligence of Polish chickens compared to others. Charles Darwin wrote about a crested hen that couldn't find her way back to her feeding station after he moved her a hundred yards away. Then in 1959 a scientist by the name of Requate trimmed the feathers of their crests and found that they reacted to stimuli (science talk for things like offering worms or making noises) in the same way as other chickens. I don't know if his results were confirmed. If his experiment can't be replicated, it's not valid science. He may have just been dealing with exceptional crested chickens.

So the mind of the Crested Polish chicken may still be a matter for debate. What's certain is that the shape of their heads is different. Their brains and skulls been studied extensively by two scientists at the University of Dusseldorf, Germany. Frahm and Rehkamper pose the age-old chicken-and-egg question:

"Does the feather crest eventually alter the shape of the skull and thus the brain, or are the alterations in brain shape the cause of the protuberance and the feather crest?"

Yet another profound evolutionary question to which we may never have an answer.