Stinky Butt Buffy

Bare Butt Buffy Update

After a few days of sitting, Buffy started rolling some eggs out from under her.

I guess Momma was a little too ambitious about how many she could sit on.

Momma said that Buffy must have started counting and decided she didn't want to tend to 20 chirping bitties.

Also, that crazy hen decided to sit on eggs during the hottest part of the summer.

There is no reasoning with a chicken.

They are quite daft creatures.

So, after 3 weeks of sitting on the eggs with minimum food and water intake, all Buffy had to show for her efforts were 17 rotten eggs and a stench that was embedded on her previously bare butt.

Bare Butt Buffy

Being a chicken whisperer's daughter has taught me a few things.

Such as, chickens are not bright.

Chickens are messy.

Chickens are scary at night.

And chicken terminology is a language all its own.

I believe it all goes back to what people have heard through generations.

For instance, my grandparents have 'leggern' chickens. If you try to look up a picture of a leggern you will not easily find a chicken. But if you put in 'leghorn', then you will find a lovable Looney Tunes character along with other pictures of lean white chickens. But on the same hand, if I ask Grandma about a 'leghorn' she would quite possibly give me the stink eye.

However, I did find a website that spelled the term 'leghorn' but also offered the pronunciation as 'leggern'.

So I know that it is commonly called such and it's not just a family quirk.
(i.e. wasps = 'whaustes')

Sorry, I'm rambling.

Another example of chicken terminology is if you have a hen that wants to 'set' (maybe it's supposed to be 'sit'--which is to mean that she wants to sit on eggs and hatch them) but you don't want her to, you have to 'break her up' or she needs to be 'broke up'.

Some say to 'break a hen up' you can dunk her in water.

Yeah, ya see, I don't think I would be doing that to Momma's chickens because I think the hen would win.
Ever gotten flogged by a chicken? Me either, but I'm scared I might one day.

Well, Momma has a chicken that would not 'break up'.
Now Momma didn't try to dunk her in a bucket of water (I think she was a little nervous about that), but she would run her out of the chicken house.
When she did, the hen would get so mad she would fluff out and pick fights with the other hens.

Poor hen, she didn't know that sitting on those eggs wouldn't do her any good.
Momma got rid of the rooster.
One of the reasons he had to go was that he made this particular hen a little crazy.
She was real skiddish and would run around like the sky was falling.
So Momma named her Henny Penny.
Well, she didn't think the sky was going to get her much after the rooster was..um..disposed of but she had lost most of her feathers off her back side.
So she got the name Bare Butt Buffy.
(She is a Buff Orpington chicken)

Now, she has almost all her feathers, so she is simply called Buffy.

Almost all the chickens have names such as Bertha, Momma Hen, Ethel, and even one is named Miranda Lambert  (A story for another time) Correction: Her name is Taylor Swift.

Still rambling, I promise this story is going some where.
Well, sort of.
Bless your heart for reading this far.

So, since Buffy was determined to sit and refused to be broke up, Momma called a few other chicken owners around here to see if they had any eggs they wanted to hatch.
She collected an assortment of 20 eggs.

Alright, so she had the eggs and the sitting hen but she couldn't just put them out in the hen house because then the fresh eggs might get mixed up with the others.

If you have ever tried to catch a brooding hen you know it can be a loosing battle.
There's a trick.
Chickens can't see at night.
Once they roost and it's dark, you can pretty much do anything you want with them because they can't see and don't put up a fight.

There are some things you just never picture yourself doing.
One is sneaking into a hen house full of hens in the middle of the night with a tiny flashlight to pick up hens and put vasoline and sulfur on their backs so they would quit pecking each other.
Momma and Daddy have done just that.

Well, we used the same technique to get Buffy out of the hen house and into the old rabbit pen so she could sit on the eggs.

 

Oh and by the way, the eggs are several different types so that should be interesting.

Momma had to suit up.
She was afraid of getting flogged.
I don't blame her and would never tease her for that.
Her fear is justified.

Now, for the scary part. Like I said, it was well past dark and we had to sneak into the hen house with a tiny flash light.
The chickens' eyes are so creepy. Then the flash on the camera spooked them.
And they make a deep gurgling sound and puff up.
It really makes you think twice about just reaching in and grabbing one.

Bare Butt Buffy was not in the mood to be messed with...

So she messed on Momma.
Like I said, chickens are messy.
And scary at night.

Oh and as you can see, she isn't bare butted any more...however, I will still call her that.

In the end, she was safely put in her temporary home as a soon to be surrogate mother.

So, if you are thinking of raising chickens but this doesn't sound like some thing you would want to do on a Tuesday night, then you should probably rethink your plans.

The Chicken Whisperer's Apprentice

Momma (AKA The Chicken Whisperer) has gone on a trip.

I enthusiastically agreed to take on her farm chores in her absence.

This evening when I got home I let Beaux out and we walked over to Momma's to get to work.

I decided I would start in the garden.

I grabbed a bucket and went to picking.

I didn't see any tomatoes ripe for picking, and thought to myself, this is going to be a breeze.

Speaking of, there was no breeze of any kind. It has been unseasonably hot and dreadfully dry lately.

Alright, no tomatoes, on to squash. At first I didn't see many of those either. They were hiding. After a few minutes I got over my fear of sticking my hand under a huge leaf and grabbing a snake instead of vegetable. On to green beans. There is entirely too much work involved to get only a handful of beans. I have decided that if we ever have a garden, it will only be in large produce. It makes you feel more accomplished.  Cucumbers and pimentos, I picked. The jalapenos stayed on the plant. I just thought it was a bad idea to start picking them since I was having to wipe the sweat from my face down every few minutes.

Garden: check.

Now chickens.

I chopped up a giant cucumber I found hidden underneath some very large leaves that was a little past its expiration date.

(Beaux spotted me picking it up and then would not leave my side because he wanted me to throw it.)

I finished washing the rest of the harvest and headed to the chicken yard.

Momma's chickens are loving chickens.

Well, they love getting fed the 'good stuff'.

They recognize the container and run to the gate.

I sprinkled handfuls of cucumber all around and they were so excited and seemed to enjoy it so much, I went back inside and cut up another one.

Then I gathered the eggs. The hen house was a little darker than I would have preferred. The fear of grabbing a snake came back with full force.

Next I had to get them clean water.

I don't understand chickens.

One water bowl was completely turned over, the others were full of dirt where they had scratched around it and now only had mud in the pans.

They should really work on their critical thinking skills.

I got the water hose stretched to the pen and went to dumping and refilling the containers.

You would have thought it was Christmas. They went to scratching and pecking in the mud.

These hens can kick up some mud...in my face.

I wrangled the water hose around to spray out the bowls and spray the mud off me and caught an awful smell. I thought, 'Whoa, these chickens stink.'

Then looked down and realized, it wasn't the chickens, it was me.

Apparently, Molly had eaten something that didn't agree with her and I had drug the water hose through the ripe-smelling poop and now it was all over me.

The hens appalled me in their lack of compassion.

In the mean time, Beaux decided that his duty was to keep the chickens from getting too close to the edge of the pen. So in the midst of being covered in mud, sweat, and poop, I was having to dodge jumping chickens that had been spooked by Beaux.

Next I needed to empty and refill the food trays. A couple of the hens had taken the liberty of pooping in those, too.

By the time I filled the food trays it was definitely well on its way to being dark. The hens were ready to roost. There have been some problems between some of the big chickens and the young chickens when it comes time to roost.  Momma told me about her trying to herd the little ones into the chicken house and push them up to the roost with a stick while nudging the bigger chickens when they wanted to cause trouble. She assured me that she would not expect me to stand in the chicken house poking chickens at dusk.

I had all plans of not poking chickens.

However, one of the big barred rocks changed those plans. The little ones would try to get up to the roost and she would start making a low gurgle sound and then peck at them to knock them off.

I wasn't having any of that.

So I found the big stick and tried to coax the little ones and poke her when she started to get unruly.

Chickens can't see well when it gets dark, but they get nervous.

One of the little ones ended up hopping onto the end of the stick and would not let go. Poor thing was hanging on for her life. I tried to gently shake her off, but she had a death grip on that stick. So I thought I would just carefully try to put her up on the roost and then she would let go and be where I wanted her to be. She wasn't having any of it! So there I am, in the dark surrounded by nervous and irritated hens, soaked with sweat, covered in mud and poop, with a chicken clinched onto the end of a stick. I couldn't very well start violently shaking the stick like I was putting out a burning marshmallow, but I was not sleeping in that hen house. All of a sudden I got so tickled that I burst out laughing. Well, luckily I startled the hen and she hopped off the stick.

I told the chickens good night and assured myself that I had not missed my calling in being a farmer.