Stella!

Usually when I get a batch of chicks from McMurray's they include a few extras (to cover for the possible deaths in transit I think) PLUS an exotic chick or two sometimes. When the box of zombie chicks arrived there was one that was not like the others in the box. It was a darker chick with stripes and I just assumed she was a layer or maybe a different meat breed. After a few weeks, she was still looking really small, however she looked healthy and she sure was active; she ran circles around those fat zombies. But they all got along so I kept the flock together and chose not to think about what I would do with the little one when the zombies went to the slaughterhouse heaven....

Some folks down the road have a bunch of chickens, including bantam chickens that skitter all over the place and after about 6 weeks I realized that she looked just like one of them. McMurray's added a bantam chicken to a flock of meaties!

And by the time I had to take the zombies in, I was more than a little ticked of about getting a bantam chick. Why couldn't they have just given me another meat chicken? What was I going to do with her???? I thought about taking her over to the neighbors to let her blend in with their flock of bantams but then Ginger named her Stella so that was it. We don't normally name our chickens as I have a hard enough time remembering HUMAN'S names, let alone 55 chicken names as well!

So once she got a name the other option was to put her in with one of the two flocks I have. Finally, I very reluctantly decided to put her in with the new layer flock. I put her in their coop one night and supposedly she was going to just mix right into the flock the next day. Um, but maybe not so well when one doesn't look like the others. I went out to the hen house the next morning and poor Stella was being chased constantly by at least twenty salivating hens and two roosters with a bad evil look in their eyes. I took her out right away and decided to try the much smaller flock of old hens and put her in with them that night. She immediately snuggled right in and then climbed onto the back of one of the hens, who looked a bit nervous but did not actually complain. Things were ok the next morning although she mostly stayed inside for the next week or so and the old ladies were not very generous with their scratch. She did go outside when it was time to free range though and came back in at night too. One night when she didn't go back in at dusk, we looked around for her and found her in the dog kennel where we had kept the zombie chickens. I felt a bit teary about that, she missed her zombies!


So it turns out that Stella is wonderful! Bantam chickens are very personable and friendly and she is no exception. She comes right up to me when I say her name, and she lets us hold her and carry her around. She is such a tiny little thing though and I worry about her free ranging but have just decided to let nature takes its course on that one. She was out of the hen house one morning when I went out there (we close the coop up at night and I guess she hadn't gone back in) and Doug and I joked about her being a tramp, but she survived a night out in the jungle that is upstate NY so she has our full admiration!

PS. And now Doug and I always imitate Marlon Brando when we say her name, just so the kids will look at us as if we are deranged. Good times!