A Buff Orpington hen I thinking for my flock.
We started out with 14 chicks, of which we did not expect them all to survive. Well of course they all did and we were soon faced with 14 grown chickens. For our family of four, that was going to be a lot of chicken management, not to mention, what to do with all the eggs. My friends had high cholesterol all summer as I pawned off fresh eggs.
We gave some of the chickens to our neighbors down the road, who had lost their entire flock to foxes. Another of our chickens was lost to canine intervention, not our dog. So our flock was reduced and we certainly couldn’t call up our neighbors and ask for our chickens back.
The shelter at which I work occasionally gets chickens who come in as strays. I know, that cracked me up at first. A stray chicken? That’s what we call country, but Marin is a little different.
Right now there are two Buff Orpington chickens, of which I was pretty excited to see. The folks at the shelter are great, but chicken knowledge is not high, so for some reason I have become the chicken expert.
It’s fun to see the chickens get adopted by the increasing number of people who are building backyard coops.
So now I am trying to decide if I should add these two lovely, bowling-ball shaped chickens to my flock. My husband’s first question was, “Could they hold their own against the girls?” meaning of course that when new chickens enter an existing flock, a touch of fighting can happen. The origins of the term “pecking order.” I think these two could and better yet, one of the Buffs is a rooster. Oohh a rooster girls!
Now I could blog on about rooster experiences, one friend recalls stepping outside his house as a kid and making sure he always knew where one particular rooster was so he could make a clean getaway. Yeah, that rooster was nasty, pecking the heck out of him and drawing blood. I envisioned a scene of a barnyard “Birds” movie.
Gosh chickens are addictive. One friend is thrilled her silver-tipped Wyandotte lived through pullet stage and presented a first egg this past month. Her love affair isn’t with the egg but with the character of the chicken.
Well what do you think? Should I add a rooster to the flock? Will my neighbors hate me? Will I end up hating that early morning wake up call with a rooster. In the grand scheme of rooster-dom, are buff Orphington roosters nicer than most?
