Chicken Littles...

Right now we have some chicks. Only four, but what a varied assortment! We like diversity here. The mother is a Buff Orpington hen, and the father is a mix from a Polish Silver Laced rooster and Sicilian Buttercup hen. Almost sounds more like flowers than chickens, doesn’t it?

Polish Silver Laced + Sicilian Buttercup =

This Rooster + Buff Orpington Hen = Some interesting Little Chicks.
Here's a more recent picture of the fast growing little chicks...
The fourth chick was abandoned in the nest by it's mother. I tried to get the above hen to accept it, but it was a little younger than her chicks, so she figured out it wasn't hers and kept pecking at it. For now it's residing in a bird cage on our back porch.

We also had a bunch of Guinea keets. (Fowl lesson for the day: baby guineas are called “keets”, not chicks.) The guinea hens have been nesting in pairs this year, with double nests containing up to 50 eggs. One pair ended up with about 16 keets out of all those eggs, one set ended up with about 5 keets, and another set abandoned their eggs after a snake kept raiding the nest.

Guineas give new meaning to the phrase "bird brain." They run up and down along a 4-foot high fence, trying to figure out how to get to the other side, when they can fly to the tops of very tall trees with ease. They're also noisy, but they have one important virtue... they eat ticks. We had a real problem with ticks when we first moved here, and now see only one or two a summer.

Guinea hen and keets crossing our driveway.

The only fowl problem is we don't have any peafowl chicks this year. I don't seem to have much luck getting them to hatch out. I have a couple of incubators filled with eggs, but no chicks yet. I keep hoping!

Meanwhile, we'll enjoy watching the fast growing chicks and keets scampering around after their mothers. It's fun to see them hopping around, scratching and trying to do "big chicken" stuff.

Chicken Littles... gotta love 'em!