Chick update

The chicks are eating a shocking amount of food and growing with amazing speed. We’ve been taking the food away at night to keep them from growing faster than their legs can support. They are ravenous in the morning. Jackie is holding his/her own amongst the larger chicks. She gets run over a lot, but she pops back up and escapes when she’s had enough. I don’t know if the size change will be visible in the pictures or not. The development of the wing feathers can be seen.

Broiler on May 22

Broiler on May 27

Jackie on May 22. He/she isn't growing as fast, although he/she did fly about  a foot off the floor this week. We put screens over the brooder box.

Pat, Nancy, and Jane came for a Memorial Day cookout yesterday. A good time was had by all. Jane visited the chicks before I had my camera. Pat and Nancy were good enough to pose.

Pat learns to keep the wings covered

Nancy looks a chick in the eye

Last week’s nature moment happened on Thursday, which is my day for chicken chores. It had rained during the night. I checked for night crawlers before I let the girls out. They love night crawlers and can find and dispatch one with lightning speed. Sometimes the early bird (with the worm) is briefly chased by others, but they seem to have learned not to dither. Grab the worm; run a safe distance; wolf it down.

Anyway, I found not one night crawler but two. They were mating. Night crawlers are reciprocal hermaphrodites—they have both testes and ovaries. When two of them hook up, they swap sperm. It’s quite efficient because it doubles the number of eggs produced. Funny it’s not more common in nature, really. .

Worms in love

It was a tragic story, though, although illustrative of the beauty of hermaphrodites. One of the two worms made it back to the burrow. Giada got the other one. The survivor will be able to produce eggs. Had it only had male function, the one that was eaten would be out of the gene pool.