My chickies are seven days old. There are about thirty of them now, hatched last weekend. All the eggs were bought except for our golden phoenix. He’s the runt of the hatch. We’ve named him Tiny Tim and we have been keeping him in a separate box from the others, which are all heavy breeds. Tiny Tim weighs about as much as a corn flake. He is colored like a chipmunk and runs around like a mouse with no arms. It’s kinda freaky, actually. But ridiculously cute. If he had arms, they would be up above his head, flailing, and he would be saying, “Ahh! I can’t find my pants!” Even though he is very tiny and they don’t make pants for corn flakes. He would drip poop in them anyway.
Did you know chickens don’t pee? They drip poop. Sometimes, they spew chunky little poop about three feet across the floor, like an aquatic jet stream. I know. I have to clean it up. Chickens have three kinds of poop. Drip poop, which is like exploded green peas in water. Stink poop, which is like mustard baby poo except stinkier, as it has killed one of our cats with pure stink at twenty paces. And normal chunky bird poop, which is kind of a greenish paté de fluogh gluogh. (That’s the sound you make when it squishes in the toilet paper between your fingers.)
Thankfully, our chickies have not begun to squirt identifiable articles of poop yet. There are green paintball splats in their woodchips, but that’s about it. I figure they have some weird bladdery organ where they’re saving up the stink poop for later. God help us, every one . . .
