This was a big week for our girls. For the first time, they got the chance to experience {somewhat} free range in the sideyard. Given that we frequently see hawks overhead, and my neighbor had a coyote run through her yard with a chicken in its mouth recently, Mr. W and I supervised the girls the entire time they were out of their pen. We're still new to this chicken parenting thing and would be totally devastated if anything happened to one of our flock.
At one point as I sat on my chicken stool (it's kind of like a milking stool except it was $6 at IKEA and I use it to sit in the yard and watch the girls scratch at the dirt), Carrie Birdshaw hopped up on my lap and began to pick at lint on my shirt. My phone was in my back pocket, so I thought it was a perfect opportunity to snap a little selfie with the golden retriever of chickens. I leaned my face down next to hers, extended my arm with camera in hand, and just as I was about to snap a shot, she pecked me square in the front teeth. Hard.
A couple weeks before that, I also had a little incident with Charlotte. I was standing in the girls' run—pretty sure I wasn't the least bit hunched over—when Charlotte decided to fly up onto my lower back and claw her way up to my shoulder. I yelled at her and quickly tried to wrangle her off of me. My back was literally covered in chicken scratch. I had to Neosporin myself up for a few days.
When I told Mr. W what happened, he said, "She was probably just trying to show her dominance. She's establishing the pecking order."
With an adult human.
I got dominated by a chicken.
So there's that.
We're expecting to find an egg or two in the coop pretty much any time now. I'm hoping after the girls start laying they'll calm down a bit. They've gotten quite surly with all their prepubescent hormones swirling around in those feathered little chicken butts.
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