- here she is sunning on the deck
- sunning.JPG (80.93 KiB) Viewed 139 times
- eating out of my hand
- eating out of my hand.JPG (78.36 KiB) Viewed 139 times
Here is Ethel our retired laying hen. She is the last one left and I think she is lonely. She comes up to the deck to sun herself and get a treat from me. She likes bread of course and she loves grapes. One day all 3 of the animals Lucy, Daisy and Ethel were on the deck as we ate supper and they all ate the same stuff which surprised me...fish, potato, beans and zucchini. Maybe Ethel thinks she's a dog too? At night she takes herself back to the chicken coop which is inside our garden shed and instead of going into the area where there is straw she perches on the handle of Jim's gas lawn mower just inside the door. I go in to check on the other chickens (they aren't layers so they can't mingle with Ethel) and say goodnight to Ethel. Sometimes if Lucy or Daisy are in a particularly bossy frame of mind they will chase her off the deck but within minutes she is up there again looking for food and company. She also likes to go under the bird feeders and pick the seed off the ground that the other birds have dropped or flicked off. So far the other birds don't seem too afraid of her but then Ethel isn't very intimidating. I don't imagine she will live much longer as she must be about 2 and I think for a chicken that is getting up there. Once they stop laying it doesn't seem very long til they start going downhill. She has slowed down considerably since the beginning of this summer where she used to drive me nuts by going into my freshly mulched flower gardens and flick all the mulch out looking for bugs....grrrrrr..... If she saw me in there weeding she would waddle over very quickly almost a half run half fly kind of thing to see if I had found any worms while I was digging around. I think she almost got poisoned once not long ago when I had powdered the roses without even thinking about Ethel and I think when she was in looking for bugs ingested some because for a couple of days she was very lethargic and would hide under my day lilies and not move. I could pick her up and cuddle her without her flapping to get away. This would happen to all the chickens at the end, they would let me pick them up and they were so very light and fragile. Ethel wasn't so light so I figure it was poison. She recovered after two days...phew.....And now she is out and about daily until one day I am sure I will find her "asleep" somewhere.
