Camera shy

When I am outside, Chico is constantly crowing. From early morning to late in the day Chico is a non stop wind-up toy. I asked the people around if it bothers them, lucky enough he is not very loud and even the houses across the road do not hear him. I worry about his sons, I imagine I will have to sell all his sons, I do not think the village would enjoy their crowing competitions once they have grown a bit. I tried and tried to get Chico on camera crowing for this post, however he would suddenly go silent whenever I had the camera. I did not know roosters got stage fright... but then again after all he is a chicken, sorry bad pun.

After many tries (which included me trying to crow like a rooster to get him going) I finally caught him on tape. Next mission to achieve, I'm going to capture on camera his kung fu moves. Oh yes, wait until you see that, Chico may be small but he is a master fighter and has a black-belt with some of his kicks, he can be lethal. After much begging and hiding and crowing, I finally got the little singer to sing, next stop "Chickens got talent"!

In my last post John left the comment that a mother hen does not always know best. Yes, true there can be some ding-bats out there, as with any animals or even some humans for that matter. Usually I have had good luck over the years with hens hatching out chicks. My mess ups involved a couple of hens and I quickly learned that if they are a bad mother, then they usually do not get better with age. Some mishaps were; when one bantam hen hatched out chicks, she would stand up and start scratching to feed them while they were still just drying off, this of course would cause her to trample and kill them. I also had a hen that after a week of sitting on her eggs, decided to leave them and go get back into the hen house to sit on the eggs in the main nest. Another hen I tried was a large Ameraucana, I should have known better as she would sometimes eat eggs. I assumed wrong that being broody would stop this. I gave her twelve eggs, after a few days she ate two of them, then all was quiet until half way through hatching I came home to only six eggs left and a huge mess of blood and egg yolk. I was so angry with the hen. At that time I happen to have a very young mixed bantam hen that had just started to go broody but I had no more room to set her up with eggs. Since she was off a really good broody bantam hen, I thought I would give the remaining eggs to her, I figured I had nothing to lose since the other hen would probably eat the remaining eggs. I cleaned up the eggs, kicked out the large hen and grabbed the small bantam mixed hen. She was happy to have a nest in peace where no one was chasing her off. She snuggled the remaining six eggs to her body and just over a week later she was a proud mom to six chicks. Mostly I had really good luck with hens hatching out chicks and like I said, I could watch the mom with chicks all day.