Here’s a Facebook memory written three years ago today. A lot has changed - Peanut achieved the Guinness record for World’s Oldest Living Chicken this year, Nettie and Goldie have joined the flock of bantams in our Baughn’s Bantams coop (named for my dear late friend Mikell Baughn, who helped finance it), Spangles has passed on, and Benny has joined Peanut indoors for the winter since Peanut’s daughter Millie died last week.
But much remains the same - I’m still taking in the disenfranchised of the area’s chicken world, and I’m still madly in love with them all.
This is my new little bantam hen Nettie. She was a gift from my friends David Riddle and Todd Gillihan after her mother was killed by a hawk. She’s the sweetest thing ever. She likes to be held as much as my old Nankin/Mille Fleurs hen Peanut, who is a grand old lady of at least 17.
Todd suggested the name because he had to use a net to catch her when I picked her up. Now I just walk out and call “Nettie!” and she flies up to meet me. In just two weeks! She has joined the little flock of Peanut’s back porch birds who beg to be let inside the screened porch every evening, where they roost in cages. In the morning I open the cages and they fly outside.
My tiniest rooster Benny has taken Nettie under his wing 😬 He’s blind in one eye and was given to me years ago by Bill’s friend George. She found him in a tree!
Another friend is Spangles, a funny little old Silver Spangled Hamburg hen with a club foot.
And then there’s Goldie, who was found one winter in the Chelsea post office parking lot. Since she crows, we think she was dropped off. But the joke’s on them - she also lays eggs!
We run a varied, non-discriminatory chicken yard. 🐔🐣😍