Odds and Ends

 

I feel really bad about all of the blog neglect I have done on my own blog this week. I sat down many times to try and write but there just wasn't a thing going on between my ears. I have been busy with work around here and busy with whatever it is I do most of the time.

Do you have time for a chicken observation? You do? Good. Just something I noticed this week with my hens.

 

 Meet Miss Free Thinker.


Notice she is running away from the camera. Most the time she wants to be in my arms or in my lap. She didn't want her picture or her story being told.

Since her tiny chick days, she has been outgoing, and brave and a very positive thinker. You laugh as I say positive thinker, because chickens are not known for their brain power. But like people some hens are positive, negative, and the ones who are closely related to Chicken Little. The negative ones are the power peckers, that is what I call them. The treat everyone as an enemy, a thief or they are just plain bullies. They never seem to meet my eyes.

 

Then there is Miss Free Thinker. Always marching to a different drummer.  I noticed that someone wasn't laying eggs in the nest boxes. I have that lovely drop down door so I don't have to go in the coop to collect eggs. I noticed that someone had made a little nest in the corner of the house. I couldn't seem to catch who was doing the egg laying in the corner until Thursday after I cleaned my coop and put in new shavings.
I opened the door, and there was Miss Free Thinker. She had made herself a nice little nest and was happily singing to herself, with just the most contented look on her little chicken face. I laughed to myself as I should have known.

Who flies to my back when I am bending over feeding? Yep, You know who. She is the first one to follow me around the coop or the yard. She doesn't follow the other hens but always goes off on her own with her little song she sings.

That is the hardest thing about raising chickens. I always love the one that goes against the grain, or does her own thing. I love free thinkers because they add spice to life, they think outside the box. They are the ones who color outside the lines. They make me laugh. They make me think. They make me ask, not why, but why not?

The same goes for Miss Free Thinker. In the life of a chicken coop, the flock mentality doesn't handle free thinkers very well. The chicken that upsets the apple cart gets ostracized. Do you know what I notice more and more about our society? Our life is becoming more like a chicken coop than a society of free thinkers.

Just some observations I made this week.  Watching chickens always makes me a fence post philosopher.

I hope you have a nice weekend. I am of course, still waiting for cool weather.

~Kim~

 

" Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?"
" Sometimes," For he was always truthful, "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

---The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams, 1922