The Story of Chuck

Earlier this summer, we had an animal attack, and only one of our 3 chickens survived.  Either raccoon or fox made a hole in the chicken wire big enough to get in the coop enclosure. She was really badly injured (half her face is missing, including the eye) and in shock.  We didn't think she'd live long and considered putting her out of her misery, but we didn't have the guts to.  But what do you know, she pulled through and is fine now.  So we named her Chuck (as in Chuck Norris) because she is a pretty badass chicken.  She lived in our upstairs bathroom for a couple months, and eventually learned how to run up and down the stairs.  Guess she doesn't miss having depth perception because birds don't really have it to start with.

Chuck quickly figured out where the cat food was and always made a beeline for the kitchen to steal some (much to the dismay of the very disgruntled cats).  We reinforced the giant homemade rabbit hutch with new welded wire, so she safely sleeps out there at night, but has the run of the backyard during the day.  Now I have company as I garden, she follows me around and eats bugs and weeds and digs little holes to scootch around in the dry dirt.  She seems pretty happy, who knows, she's a chicken after all.  She's a pet all of a sudden though, with her own individual friendly personality. I'm glad that the cats are scared of her and give her a lot of room, but they really keep an eye on her.  We have to make sure to close the door to the backyard or she sneaks in and tries to get to the catfood, guess it tastes good compared to her usual  feed.

































It's hard to believe that Chuck can just get along like that, figuring out how to cope with only one eye all of a sudden. But animals are resilient and do what they need to in order to keep living.  Pretty inspirational to me really.  Especially because she just started laying eggs once again.  After all that trauma and almost dying, she's back to normal, a new normal.  Just with a little time and a bit of extra care from her clueless owners.

Printing Chickens

 I recently found this chicken wood-block at a local store and just couldn't resist, because, chickens!  I got out the Dr. p.h. Martin's ink and dry ink stamping pad that I like to use for stamping and some nice tight pima cotton and tried it.  Didn't work too well, as you can see below on the left.
The stamp isn't very even on the stamping surface, so I put a layer of quilt batting underneath to give more to press into and make all of the stamp surface come into contact with the fabric.  I also used my trusty brayer to get the ink onto the stamp because the stamp pad didn't work too well either.

 It did much better printing with the quilt batting underneath.

 And the third print?

Hmmm, still pretty spotty.  The ink was gathering in these deep cut out parts in the design.  I think I'll either thicken the ink, or use fabric paint next time in hopes that it will just stick on the stamping surface.
Not giving up, I need more chickens...

Eggs-actly My Point

Just because it is a Sunday here is a completely off-topic post all about eggs.
We love keeping chickens, the fresh eggs are the best, so tasty and fresh, the chickens like to eat weeds and kitchen scraps, make regular contributions to the compost pile ingredients, they aren't too much trouble, and I find their antics and noises very entertaining. 
There was a big hubbub in the coop recently and I gathered the eggs afterward.  I think I figured out what the upset was, look at the size of that egg.  It is huge, almost twice the size of the others.  Let's just say, that I'd have been squawking extra too!
I had to take this picture to prove it to those who weren't around to see it.  Because we then had to open the egg up immediately just to see what was inside.  Just a double yolk.  With our first chickens we once got a huge egg like this, and inside was another egg (weird!), no picture of that unfortunately.  I liked how this picture turned out with the green towel and the shadows.

The lid of the egg carton wouldn't even close!
That reminds me I need to take some pictures of this new group of chickens, one of them is really huge compared to the other two.