Profiles in Birdage

Here are Ed and Red, back in the days when they lived on their own.  Those days are now long gone.  As Emma might say, they are so two days ago.  Tonight, Ed and Red went to bed in the shed without any assistance from us.




They have not resolved all of their issues.  When I looked into the shed tonight, I found the two of them sleeping all squished together on top of their feeder, which is about 5 inches in diameter.  It seems that even with all the other biddies sleeping on the roost, they couldn't figure out what to do, which would also explain all the doots we've been finding in their food for the last two mornings. I moved both of my goofball chickens to the roost and I'm hoping they'll take the hint.  Either that, or they'll be totally freaked out when they wake up there in the morning.

"Ed" and "Red," as you may have guessed, are not their original names.  We named the three chicks that we bought from our local feed store after flowers.  The bright yellow one was Sunny Sunflower.





And the other two were Daisy and Lily. 



The girls claimed they could tell Daisy and Lily apart, but I mixed them up all the time (the birds, not the girls).  I really couldn't tell them apart unless I saw them next to each other, at which point I would say that the one with the darker head and lighter body was Daisy, because that made sense if you imagined her head being the center of the flower.  The other one was Lily only because she wasn't readily identifiable as Daisy.

Then, the day after we moved the birds to their new coop, Daisy (or Lily) vanished and I had no way of figuring out which bird I still had.  Whoever was left, though,  was a really pretty bird.  I love her black and tan plumage and her fan shaped tail feathers.




Her only real problem is this:




She has a scissor beak, which is permanently misaligned and makes her look a little crazy-scary. As much as we try to be accepting and supportive and All Creatures Great and Small-ish, that beak took a little getting used to. For rather obvious, if politically incorrect, reasons  Lily (or Daisy or whatever the heck her name is) began to be known as Beaky. And then, despite our public stand against cruelty to animals and our great desire to always model positive behavior for our children, we began to call her Edward Scissorbeak, which is (pardon the pun) a mouthful and was quickly shortened to Ed. This is probably not unexpected from people who also have a hen called Mike. Poor Sunny, who actually is a pretty reddish brown color, didn't get to hang on to her given name for too long after Beaky became Ed.  And that's all I have to say about that.





(Also, there's no real point to this picture. I just liked the colors.)