transgendered chicken

well, long time no blogging, eh?

My sister, Lindsey, was in town from the 30th to the 7th, and I'm still catching up on some things. It was a fun visit and we got to do some fun things (and well, some boring things too, but that is part of life). some of the fun highlights: a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park for a day of hiking, a tour of Coors Stadium, getting stuck in my dead truck at Chataqua park, playing the game Life, baking cookies, and watching some good movies.

On monday night, Michael and I realized it was the first time we were both home at the same time without a house guest since my birthday (that's three and a half weeks for the mathematically challenged). We have a few days this week, and he leaves for another trip on Saturday morning. By the time he comes back from this trip, from June 18 to August 18, we'll have had 14 days together in 2 months! good grief!

And the farm news...the adolescent chicks are all laying eggs. Today our Arucana named Baby laid her first egg (it's a green one, Paulie!). In the last week it has become apparent that one of our chicks, Bunny, is probably not a girl chicken. Bunny is probably a rooster (a boy). I was pretty devestated when I started to figure this out a few days ago...lots of crying, as my sister can verify. The problem is that we don't want a rooster, and we don't really have enough girls to keep a rooster busy, and roosters are pretty mean. We selected chicks that were supposed to be sexed and sorted, and all this time we thought Bunny was a girl. In the last week and a half, she's gotten a lot taller, her tail has started to grow in with long shiny feathers, and she has started to jump on the other girls in the way that roosters jump on hens. I was hoping she was a lesbian hen, but her physical traits and her behaviors are starting to be pretty rooster-like. Our choices are not good: try to find a rooster rescue (pretty unlikely) or kill our transgendered Bunny (ok, ok, she's not a transgendered chicken, he's a rooster).

...horrible realization just now. The only animals we've given animal names to were doomed to die: Chicken and Duck were brutally murdered by a skunk, Pig (the chicken) was found in the hen house with a broken neck, and now Bunny is a rooster. too much crying at the moment...must go.