Chicken fights

The chicks continue to grow quickly. The roosters’ combs are getting ever so slightly larger and redder than the hens. I’m not prepared to separate the hens just yet, but I certainly have my suspicions. It looks to me like we have only one Welsummer rooster of the six survivors of that variety. The rooster is a darker color overall in addition to having the larger comb.

Buff Orpington rooster on the sun shade

Welsummer hen

Welsummer rooster

Lidia is getting a black beard. She and Cleopatra look more alike than they did when they were chicks.

Nadia and Gracie’s head feathers are almost long enough to flop over.

Cleopatra

Lidia (left) and a Buff Orpington hen

Nadia

I tried hard to get a good video of a chicken fight. It is a difficult task as the location of any given chicken fight is completely unpredictable. Instead of one good video, I have a montage of bad ones. The typical sequence is that the chicks fly at each other (sometimes they collide, sometimes not), have a little stare down, and then pretend that nothing happened. I find it hilarious and could watch for hours. The world would be a happier place if humans adopted the same battle strategies.

I saw the strangest thing on the patio yesterday. Early in the morning, I noticed that ants were swarming out of the cracks. When Terry put the patio down, he very carefully filled the cracks with some kind of hugely expensive sand that was supposed to prevent the ants from nesting. The ants didn’t get the memo, and we’ve got ant hills all over the place. About 11:00, I saw odd star shapes in the area where the swarm had been. I had to look very closely to make out that several ants were surrounding one ant. The head of the central ant had its jaws locked with the jaws of another ant. The remaining ants seemed to be tapping on the central ant’s body. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to pick up chemical signals or attacking. I concluded it was the latter because in some of the stars, the central ant was curled up and not looking so good. Yet all the ants looked exactly alike. I may have witnessed a hostile takeover of a nesting site either by a different family of the same species or a physically very similar yet different species of ant. Only the ants know for sure. By 1:00, it was all over. Regular ant traffic had resumed at its low level.

Stars of ants on the patio

We have had some rain every day for the last week. Yesterday Hilda and I walked down to the creek to see how full it was getting. Despite the precipitation, it is still well below the banks. Terry looked up the stats from last year’s floods. The pattern was similar—between half an inch and an inch of rain every day—except for the day of the flood, when we got 3”. Hopefully that won’t happen.

While we were back by the creek, we checked on the wild black raspberries. We are on track to have a good harvest. We saw a meadowlark in the field. I don’t remember seeing one here before. Also new this year is a large population of frogs out in the tall grasses. I haven’t seen one, but the chorus at night is amazing. I heard the calls of at least two different species. We saw a couple of fireflies last night. The primroses are blooming. It’s really summer now!

Primroses