So spring has sprung and it's a lovely time to be a chicken with all the spiders sneaking around, baby grasshoppers showing up, snails lurking around the rocks, and piles of little earthworms under the old leaves, besides all the fresh salad spread out for the grazing. (Imagine walking around in your food because there is just so much of it...) Sometimes you get lucky and find a little patch of wild strawberries or tiny little baby snakes as skinny and fun to slurp down as spaghetti! But we live in a scary neighborhood full of big dogs, plus being on the edge of Mirkwood is actually quite dangerous. We've lost several chickens and two ducks in broad daylight within feet of us in the backyard to foxes and hawks (what I'd give for a slo-mo recording from a webcam!), so we don't dare stay out more than 20 minutes at a time. Especially when the woods suddenly get really quiet...

I've got mine trained to come in for special treats. Today it was a can of corn and a piece of bread, yummy!

Still, it's really hard to stop stuffing your face and move along when you're surrounded by paradise after such a long dull boring winter.

Oopsie, T'Pol doesn't seem to be around anywhere. Well, when one goes missing, you get the others put up and then go looking. I went back to where I saw them last before I came in the house and looked for feathers. Nothing.

She could just be out there in a happy bubble gobbling up a motherlode of worms, right? Not the first time I've had to trench into the deeper woods and brave the chiggers, ticks, copperheads, tree spiders (big webs you walk into face first- yeah, Mirkwood), and poison ivy and poison oak. I'd almost rather sacrifice a chicken back to nature than go round another tick disease (I'm a Lymie) or wind up on prednisone and extra benadryl. I can handle snakes, but I really hate spiders, and we have some as big as your hand around here.

In woods like these, you keep your eyes peeled for color changes and movement (especially as T'Pol has excellent camo!), and listen for someone kicking leaves around. Chickens have a distinctive kick pattern. Usually you also hear squirrels or rabbits making a racket bounding through the old leaves embedding the forest floor, but at the moment it was so very quiet, I could only imagine a hawk must have stealth bombed my poor chicken and all the critters and birds froze till the coast was clear. That's happened before without the other chickens even noticing. The crunchy sounds you hear are me walking, and I didn't call out because I was listening. Halfway through you can see the other chickens really watching me from the pen.

I finally gave up and went back to the pen, where all the other chickens were still gathered at the pen door wondering what in the world I was doing. I told them it was too bad they couldn't tell me where they saw her last, and suddenly I was all face palm going OH, she's on a nest! (This is where I have to wonder sometimes if animals are much more aware than we think and could probably communicate in visuals telepathically if we just knew how to shut up our minds and let them, because the timing was incredible.) T'Pol isn't the most reliable layer in the world, being a heritage breed (Speckled Sussex), and since it had been so long since we'd gotten an egg from her (she lays the smallest ones, easy to spot), I assumed she'd stopped laying altogether like a Sussex we'd had previously that laid only one month and stopped forever. And sure enough, there she was.

The only experience I have with Speckled Sussex are Bean (former flock) and T'Pol (I've otherwise been around chickens all my life), and they both seem to be the most intelligent I've had as far as interspecies interaction goes. Kinda dumb for chicken survival because they're so laid back and the opposite of my flightier hens that you sometimes wish something would pounce on and carry off because they're so aggravating when their nerves go off. But they literally walk around our feet like cats to the point where we nearly stumble over them, and you can see T'Pol was fine with eating out of my hand. She is also my talker, the first one to come get me and complain that she's bored or to tell on someone or ask me what I'm doing or look all around me for snacks. If you are thinking about getting chickens and don't have any experience, toss a Speckled Sussex into the mix and make a pet of it. Other people claim their Sussex are pretty good layers, but their average ranges from 180-240 eggs a year, depending on environment, health, and stress levels. I think Bean suffered a shock from jumping right on top of a 6 foot black snake when she flew up to a nest one day, because she stopped laying cold turkey, laid one egg inside out a week later, and then literally went hermaphrodite on us. Her comb suddenly poofed up bigger, her tail feathers got longer and curved more, and then she started trying to crow, so she became truly transgendered. This isn't terribly uncommon in the chicken world, so we found it pretty amusing. Here is the snake.

I know some people take their chickens in to see the vet. I don't do that. What I need is a chicken psychologist. (For the chicken, not me, whoever in the back made that remark.)

Spencer, the only chicken left from a previous flock, never got along with other chickens, more inclined to being wild and freaky, and no one would be her friend. After the rest died off in various ways, she settled down and became the best chicken pet ever, following us around the yard right at our feet. Sorry these are so poor, I got them on an old phone. Scott was helping her catch grasshoppers.

Then we got new chickens and she tried to kill them, so after two days of running the whole flock into ragged nervous exhaustion (I've never seen such commitment in chicken evilness, she is like a machine and never rests), we finally removed her to her own pen. So now she freaks out so much that we HAVE to let her out to go stand by the big pen, but any time we let her really join them she gets so violent that I actually fear she'll kill them, and believe me, I grew up with game chickens fighting, I *know* what chickens can do to each other. She is the craziest chicken I've ever seen. And lately she's taken to trying to roost on top of the Quackerdome (the main chicken house) and gets upset when Scott takes her back to her own roost, which she was perfectly content on when she was the only chicken around for 6 months. I want to just leave her out to be wild, because that is where her heart truly lies, but Scott is a big softie and worries about her getting cold or pounced on by an owl. So we live day after day with her nonstop whining, which is as bad as listening to a dog bark its stupid head off all day. Last summer a visitor dubbed her The Prisoner, and one day when she got out past Scott's feet it turned into "Prisoner Zero has escaped" like from Dr. Who, so now Spencer's alias is Prisoner Zero.

For the curious, Spencer is a Brown Leghorn and was named after the Spencer's store on the mall. That year our chicken name theme was retailers. We also had Dooney (Dooney and Bourke), a California White,

Bean and Spencer dusting bathing. Silly Bean found my lettuce bowl, makes dusting more ~fun~!

Playing with my new phone.

These silly girls tried to follow me out to the mailbox today. They hang at my feet like cats. They follow me right back into their pen even if they just got out. Chicken herding has never been easier than with this flock.

Scott has an affinity for rooftops. He's usually on top of ours, way super high off the ground.

I have a professional yard cleaning service. My pretty girls are saving me from the evil bugs.

If you've never kept chickens, you can't imagine how unbelievably soap opery your life can become. This guy is a problem for me.

And what old lady doesn't just fall in love with a beautiful gangly teenage boy? Well, he's getting past the gangly part now, but ok, say he's like 25 or something, and he's going all drop dead gorgeous on me, kinda like Bradley James in Merlin. He's suddenly starting to get his confidence and following the girls around, which you hear throughout the day as surprised and very angry squawks, because about all you get when someone twice your size hops on is one squawk. It kinda sounds like someone tripping over an old fashioned bicycle honk horn off and on through the day. *squawk* ~he's at it again~

Living with stuff like that going on makes a person think about things, like how we all can't do much more on this planet than practice on each other. We practice all kinds of stuff until we eventually sift out the important stuff and get it (hopefully) boiled down to kindness and consideration. In the meantime, we all take turns tolerating what others stumble around learning, in this case, impromptu sex without any kind of manual. Humans at least get all kinds of social guidance, but that poor rooster has to figure it all out by himself on a group of angry females.

The problem is that I live in a covenanted subdivision that doesn't allow 'farm animals' (and that includes frowning on racing pigeons), but I'm getting away with a few chickens since 2005 because we house them in a very nice building tucked back behind the house (and it actually matches our house, right down to the siding and tiled roof) and I stubbornly have them documented with a psychologist that these particular pets are important to my psychological health. I grew up with chickens, but never had them here until my health took a nasty nosedive and I spent several years recovering from injury and illness impacting my nervous system, which totally sucked. Desperate for distraction and a reason to crawl out of my house and into my yard, I wobbled into the local feed store and came home with baby chicks. That works, by the way. If you can't find a reason to keep living through anguish and pain, by all means, *create one*. I'm much better now, and I have no doubt it's because I challenged myself to the caring for other beings on this planet that required more of me than I thought I was capable of giving.

Ok, got sidetracked. The problem is that a rooster crowing in this neighborhood is a dispute just waiting to happen, to put it nicely. Neighbors have taken each other to court over so little as a foot of lawn, and the whole covenant thing means some of my neighbors go to great pains to enforce little 'laws' that are so nidiotically stupid that you can't believe they have nothing better to do with their lives than to write lengthy letters to offices in the county courthouse. What's even more frustrating is that these same neighbors will own very expensive dogs that the state says is illegal for me to shoot at even with a pellet gun (but the state conversely strongly encourages us to shoot and kill 'feral' cats), and these dogs sometimes run around the whole neighborhood, leaving wakes of chaos and destruction.

Personally, if *I* owned a $900 dog, I'd be a little worried someone would kidnap it (Missouri has one of the highest dognapping rates in the U.S. for illegal pit bull fight training). One year got so bad that I put video on youtube of a neighbor's dogs throwing themselves maniacally against my chicken pens (chickens will destroy themselves having panic attacks and stop laying for days, and I have rare breed chickens that have to be special ordered, so I get a little tense), and I was so ill that year that I could barely get across my lawn, and just trying to grab one of the dogs (I grew up with dogs, I can handle dogs) turned into a scary situation because I didn't have the mobility or strength to negotiate its constantly lunging body weight. The only thing I can do about the dogs legally is call the police, but I can't illegally detain the dogs, so by the time the police come, it's just my word, unless I've got video of the uncontrollable violence. Chickens are like the playstation of the dog world, that's total video gaming to them, and sooner or later, someone dies and the dog rolls happily in extra points and the easter egg prize, pun intended. Anyway, the point is, I have more leverage with the dog owners and whatever legal recourse they feel entitled to in the name of peace and quiet (which is a joke with their ATVs) if I keep comparatively quieter hens and no noisy rooster.

The simplistic answer to this problem by nearly everyone I know is just eat the rooster. And yes, I grew up doing that, that's what you do, it's practical, it's logical, and it's the circle of life on any farm. You eat your pets. Your babies. Your loved ones. And that's where this soap opera goes all nutty, because, thanx to midlife and a major hormone crisis last spring that dredged up flashbacks of losing an unborn child in an awful way, I can't touch this. You know why women anywhere near menopause either stay on birth control or wind up on head pills? Because people who *don't* can wind up like ~moi~, melting down into disassociating on a highway in traffic. I don't take 'medicine', like Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies, but a LOT of women I know drink their way through their midlife crises. I'm a firmly renounced alcoholic, I drank that stuff like koolaid in my mid 20's and nearly destroyed myself. I've spent the last two years getting *off* handfuls of meds that got me through the worst of my debilitating pain, and I'm not going back on them because they screwed me up in the long run as much as anything could. So I'm just gritting my teeth and pushing forward through skating around the edge of what feels like mental illness, although my psychologist assures me I'm ok, take it slow, 'small bites', weather through the hormones readjusting themselves. It sounds like this is really common stuff, but you don't just hear women confessing how 'crazy' they feel during big hormone changes because it's so taboo, especially now with tv shows like Snapped (which I've actually never seen).

So here's the deal. I grew up killing things, on a Mennonite farm. I have strong values and core beliefs, but I grew up with a hatchet in one hand and a knife in the other. I grew up smelling blood, blood smeared all over me and other stuff, even worked on jobs later where lots of blood was involved, like cleaning in a hospital after births and surgeries and deaths. The LAST thing I want in my life while I'm feeling even vaguely crazy is a beautiful little guy dying by my hands and then having its blood on me and then *eating* it, because right now everything is triggering flashbacks of losing that baby.

This is a big thing. There are people I know who won't understand this, they'll think I'm making a bigger deal of it than it actually is, I'm being ridiculous. When you grow up around practical people, you get blown off a lot if you have a problem. Or if you are the rock solid one around other flighty people, they're floored when you suddenly have the problem, they don't know what to do with you. I'm in a weird situation. But people who didn't grow up killing what they eat are probably shocked to read this. Any vegetarian, I'm sure, is doubly shocked that this is such a conundrum in the first place.

I had to break down and spell it out to Scott the other day, because he wasn't getting it, either. He's sweet, though, and asked around work if anyone would want a rooster, and guess what, tomorrow is the big day. A coworker has a brother who in years past was a principal or superintendent or something in one of the school districts, and he has chickens. *wow* Talk about luck. And after I hand my rooster off, this burden is gone, and I don't have to know any more what happens. Dr. Isaac Parrish just might hit the jackpot and get thrown in with a whole flock of more experienced hens... I doubt his new owner will call him that, but for a short time in my little life, a chicken named Dr. Parrish was a real thing. And that's where it's a good thing I named him for a tv character, because otherwise I'd be able to say I saved Wil Wheaton's life, and people really would think I was crazy.

We're starting to call Abby 'Prince Abner' now... She/He is front and center there.

I go out of my way to order hens (for this flock I drove personally to another city) because my neighbors aren't keen on the crowing. I'm not keen on their dogs, but we've agreed to declare my yard a demilitarized zone. They keep their dogs out of my yard, I don't get roosters.

I have butchered a LOT of chickens in my life. When you grow up Mennonite on a farm, you see*. death*. everywhere*. It's a way of life and I have no problem eating chicken, but as I've gotten older, I've gotten softer. It kills me to have to kill my chickens now, even if they're miserably dying of illness and old age. I love them, wah!!!!

Abs is a beautiful bird, and either she's going to be an Amazonian machine, or he's going to be dinner. This is weighing more and more heavily on my mind every morning, with the crowing... It's been so many years since I've eaten one of my own babies, I'm not sure I can do it anymore.

Roosters are funny thangs. They're actually kind of effeminate the first three months, usually looking more and more like giant klutzes, and you wonder what the crap because you paid top dollar getting them sexed and surely this one isn't having a growth hormone problem, you know? I've seen a lot of weird genetic stuff in chickens, anything is possible. But then the crowing starts... It's like when a boy's voice starts changing, it sounds really weird for awhile and you go, really?, and that's what makes you think it might still be a hen, because hens crowing can sound a little ridiculous. Btw, that doesn't mean they're turning into roosters or going androgynous, it's just a natural bird thing for a tribal leader to clearly state territory proclamations. If there is no rooster, a lead hen sometimes naturally takes over. It's a very important job and must be done correctly, and you can go all Terry Pratchett-y if you dwell on that too long.

Anyway, I've been through this umpteen times, gangly awkward teenager goes giganto and starts irritating everyone, practicing foolishly on old hens who get miffed when an ideal opportunity pops up as they are getting a drink, and next thing you know, Jr. is on his back in the water bowl because he can't keep his balance, and the old lady's head is squashed under the kid ~in the water~, and, well, I'm pretty sure that's where the saying "mad as a wet hen" originated from.

And then the spurs start nubbing out, and boy don't they feel all sassy then, and oh look, legs walking across the yard, *stealthstealthcoolstealth* here he comes, dragging a wing and hopping sideways, then the LEAP, and *whamo*, I block the nidiot with a slick hip move and send him rolling, and he thinks that's so awesome that he comes right back and keeps throwing his body all over me, and dang if he's not trashing my good pants, what was I thinking wearing them in the back yard... My dad got specially bred fighting roosters one year because he thought they'd look pretty walking around the yard, boy was that a joke. You get one of those guys on your head and it's exactly like a cartoon, but with real blood. Nowadays you could impress people saying a zombie nearly got you.

I'm kind of hoping we can wait this one out and see what happens, maybe break out the good camera and have some fun with it. And maybe rename the guy. I'm not crazy about just sliding it over to 'Abner', and I really wanna stick to my tv character theme. Abby was for two Abbies, the one on NCIS, and the one on Primeval. You know what? Today is Wil Wheaton's birthday, I could use one of his characters, like Dr. Isaac Parrish (who is, incidentally, a dick) from Eureka. Or I *could* just name him Wil Wheaton, because technically he played himself on The Big Bang Theory but I hate to do that because later on I'd be saying Yeah, Wil Wheaton got mangled in a dog attack, or Wil Wheaton got hit by a car, or we ate Wil Wheaton for supper last night, and a phrase like that could wind up throwing some kind of horrible cosmic irony at me if me saying that happened to coincide with something terrible actually happening to the guy. I mean, what if a raccoon found a way into the pen and ate Wil Wheaton's brain? And the biggest Prairie Kingsnake Scott ever saw went slithering past the Quackerdome door while it was wide open last spring, easily 4 feet long. You just never know, so that's why I don't name chickens after anyone real, because it sounds bad when you tell someone they died, you know? Kinda bothers my sister to hear someone had a pig named her name but it died, can't say I blame her. She has a cute name that winds up in songs, so I'm not saying it was disturbing to have a pig named after her, ok, this is getting out of hand, you know what I mean.  It sounds like a jinx.

Behold, Dr. Isaac Parrish.

I grew up around chickens and started raising my own when I was about 18, I think. I live in an area that's like a chicken mecca, big hatcheries in several directions, and big production barns a little further out. There are breeding farms within half a days' drive that specialize in rare breeds of quail and partridge, turkeys and pheasants, geese and ducks, and even peacocks. It's not unusual to see emu ranches, and I even had an emu fall out of a trailer in front of me on an exit ramp one year. Don't worry, I didn't run over it.

My dream since I was a child was to have peacocks, and there are so many cool 'collector' colors out there now that I positively drool, so that's definitely on a bucket list. Problem with peacocks is they are *noisy* thangs, so I'm hoping we move to a bigger place for those. A rural subdivision full of fancy dogs is no place for peacocks.

When you grow up on farms and ranches and have to name a lot of animals, it becomes kind of a game, and sometimes you develop themes. When we were teenagers we had goats, and one set of twins was called called Bunny and Jack (put Rabbit after that), another set was Timex and Speidel (watches). My niece named a calf Tuna when she was little, and her sister had a cat named Amino. I try not to name pets after people I know, especially chickens, because chickens tend not to live that long, and you hate to go, oh, so and so died... I know my sister finds it frustrating when someone pops up that they have a dog or pig with the same name as her, and other people might find it disturbing, too, so I try to stick to themes. For instance, my last flock before this one was named after retailers, although Macy was technically named after the parade. I also had a Dooney (& Bourke), Bean (as in L.L.), and Spencer.

This year's flock is named after tv characters. I started with 8, but Zelda (after Ocarina of Time) went into seizures her first week and didn't make it, so I lost my first ever Cuckoo Maran, which would have laid 'chocolate' eggs. (I'm linking so you can see pictures if you want.) The names don't always fit, but I had the names picked out before we ever got the chicks.

Myka (from Warehouse 13) is an Indian River, and I was under the assumption she would turn out red like her mom with the Delaware markings like her dad, but she's a beautiful white. Supposed to be a super egg layer.

Mary Margaret turned out not to be as 'Snow White' as I thought she would be (from Once Upon a Time). She's an Austra White, another mixed breed for vigorous laying. I've never had a pink faced white chicken with black legs before, so the joke is that she's my naughty Catholic, a lady of the night in her stockings, as it were.

Abby (from either NCIS- Scott's choice, or Primeval- my choice, take your pick) is a puzzle. I knew what a Columbian was supposed to be like, it's a particular color pattern, and our Abby is spot on. But she's turning into a monster. The hatchery guaranteed 93% accuracy on sexing, and out of 8 chicks, that means there is a fairly strong chance of one of them turning out to be a rooster, so we're hoping Abby is just going to be a big gal. I've had heavy breeds before, but our Abby is only 3 months old and already bigger than all my old hens were, so I hope it's not a growth hormone problem. Sometimes you see weird stuff.

T'Pol (from Star Trek: Enterprise) turned out to be my most aptly named chicken, very first one to investigate and do everything. She's a Speckled Sussex, and already looking more petite than Bean from my last batch (who got pounced on by a hawk when she was 3). I've never seen a more curious breed than this, not sure if it's common trait or I just got two flukes in a row.

Nadia G (from Bitchin' Kitchen) is a Golden Laced Wyandotte. A Wyandotte trait across the board is a rose comb, which I'd never tried out before in all my years of raising chickens. Kinda reminds me of the little dress hats my mom used to wear to church. So far Nadia is our tamest, likes to come see what we're doing and stand by us, lets me get pictures without freaking out.

Morgana (from Merlin on Syfy here in the States) is a Silver Laced Wyandotte, and my most drop dead gorgeous chicken, easily the most photogenic, so I think I matched the name up pretty good with her.

Amy Farrah Fowler (from The Big Bang Theory) is our wonky little oddball. She's a 'Blue Egger', basically a mutt that is supposed to have the blue egg gene, which is dominant. She was the cutest chick because of her little muff around her face, but she's grown into something so cartoony that we can't help thinking that her front half looks like the chicken hawk from Looney Tunes. She grew funny and has an unusual gait, so her back half moved like a pigeon until she matured, and she still uses her legs like they were patched on by an Igor. She has never cried and eats like a pig, so I don't think she was ever in any weird growing pain, but she's always going to be tiny and weird. The coolest thing about her is she has awesome super fluffy 'blue' feathers underneath the funny light ginger color.

So I'm trying out Wyandottes this year. I've tried so many kinds of chickens, but never before Wyandottes, and I'm finding out there is a worldwide hobby devoted to new colors called feather lacing (scroll down that page for some truly beautiful birds). Might try it myself one day. Click on the icon for more about designing your own chickens.

Blue laced reds are on my bucket list, one of the rarest varieties in the world.

Personal note on Egyptian Fayoumi, one of the many breeds I've raised, you might wanna treat these like game birds for awhile, they tend to fly off into the trees and don't necessarily come back. The ones I had were about as wild as any I've seen. Somewhere in Missouri is a flock of wild chickens...