Eighth of an Acre Bounty

This is Blume, she’s little but she ain’t afraid to look you in the eye. Blume is by far the most social (toward humans) chicken of the three. We got the girls from a good friend  who has a much larger flock a couple of hours away and in the first few days of the move and reorganization, it seems Blume came out on the bottom of the new pecking order established in our backyard. No doubt in large part to her size, she is a Bantam and is about half the size of Cleary and Dahl (a Wyandott and Arucana respectively). Within her first week at her new home she had lost the majority of the feathers on her head due to Dahl pecking at her and generally bossing her around. Blood was never drawn (a blessing) but Blume had it pretty rough for a while there. We tried separating her from the other two to give her head a chance to heal, but she went crazy – pecking and lunging at the fence that contained her. So we put her back in the pen with the other two to see if they could work it out (I still attended to her head and cleaned it daily for about a week with hydrogen peroxide).

And now, two-and-a-half months after we first acquired our new residents, things are pretty well settled. No, Blume hasn’t staged a coup and risen to the top of the chicken kingdom. She is still the low woman on the totem pole, but she has more than made up for this by being fast. And I don’t just mean chicken chasing a bug fast, this little girl is awesome fast – if there were a chicken Olympics I’d enter her as a sprinter. Due to her new found speed and her ability to fly-jump to locations the other two heavier girls can’t get to,  Blume now has feathers growing back on her head and is generally the happiest chicken I’ve ever met.

Of course she has (dare I say it) taken on favorite status around here. We have big gaping soft spots for the underdogs, the wounded and the otherwise ill prepared animals of the world. She gets hand fed anytime scratch is scattered. And she regularly gets the choice beetles and bugs that Gary encounters while chasing morning glory. She has also taken to perching on an upturned stump in the pen as if to look down on the other girls and glory in the fact that she can make it up there and they can’t reach her.

She sat there yesterday for about an hour, monitoring the backyard and waiting for one of us humans to come over and give her a treat. Chickens are great.