A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I'm still working on getting photos on DW, but if you can see Facebook, I put some chick pics there.

When we got them, the Americauna (they lay blue eggs) was half the size of the others and had splay-leg. The poor thing could barely walk, kept getting knocked over by the others (unintentionally, but still), seemed depressed, and mostly lurked under the incubator, not eating or drinking.

We treated her with a hobble to strengthen her legs, but we were worried she'd die - birds are delicate and baby birds even more so. (We tried other things too, but suffice it to say they were all wretched failures and the hobble was the only thing that seemed to do anything but stress her out even more.) Kebi named her Beauty to encourage her.

After a week, in which she kept seeming to be hanging on by a thread, we took the hobble off. Two days later, she was zipping around the pen. We moved them all to a big horse trough, since they were too big for the original box. And now, at three weeks old, Beauty is the same size as the smallest of the other chicks, and by far the fastest!

It's hilarious to watch her go for mealworms. She's a spherical ball of black feathers with a fuzzy white butt, and she zig-zags madly around, twice as fast as any of the others, moving like a character from an 80s video game. Kebi says she looks like Pac Man, but much faster.

The chicks all have distinct personalities. Dotty and Wanda like to perch on my hand, and Whiskers (who has muttonchops) made me realize the origin of the word "peckish" because she gobbles so much that at times you can watch her visibly get fatter.

In conclusion, I now want chicks of my own. It's impossible with my current apartment, but I've been thinking of getting a place with a yard for a while now - I want to garden more, I need a generator for medical reasons (refrigerated meds) and it's impossible in my current situation, and now I want chickens.

I have long had a dream of living an at least partly self-sufficient life, ever since I was a kid reading the Little House books. (The Ingalls were also only partly self-sustaining - very few humans have ever lived entirely without the help of others. The only one I can think of offhand is Juana Maria, the inspiration for Island of the Blue Dolphins. Modern-day hermits don't make ALL their own stuff like she did.)

So this last year, I learned to garden and bake bread. My ambition is to garden, eat my own vegetables, feed the chickens some scraps and compost the rest, and eat their eggs. And, of course, enjoy their twittering company and pretend I'm a Disney princess when they flock to perch on my outstretched arms, which has now literally happened. See photo proof!

A delightful middle-grade novel about a girl who acquires a flock of chickens with superpowers.

I feel like that’s really all that needs to be said. Either this is something you immediately want to read, or not. But a few more things I liked about it…

- It’s epistolatory, told completely in the form of letters, chicken quizzes and pamphlets, to-do lists, etc.

- There are a lot of completely accurate chicken facts.

- The superpowers are used the way that actual chickens would use superpowers if they had them. They’re not superintelligent chickens, just regular chickens with unusual abilities.

- The heroine, Sophie, is biracial (white father, Mexican-American mother) and while this is relevant to the story, it’s not what the story is about. Are you or do you know a Latina girl who wants a book where someone like them is the heroine and it’s not about Issues? Do they like chickens and/or The X-Men? Then they are the perfect reader for this book.

- Honestly though anyone is the perfect reader for this book. I guess unless they hate and fear chickens.

Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer

Yes, that Isabella Rossellini, glamorous movie star. And also, charming chicken fanatic. This book consists of an account of how Rossellini ordered a box of chicks and fell headfirst into becoming a chicken fan, plus her genuinely informative and fun explanation of chicken evolution, chicken heritage breeds, and other fascinating chicken facts. It’s about one-third text, one-third Rossellini’s own adorable cartoon illustrations, and one-third glamour photographs of chickens plus some decidedly non-glamorous photos of herself with her chickens.

This book gets my vote as the single most delightful thing I’ve read all year, and this was the year that I discovered Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax and A Nun in the Closet. Perhaps it’s relevant that I borrowed it from my step-mom, who raises chickens, and I read it while staying on her property and the day after we went to a farm to pick up a replacement rooster for her rooster Dragonne, tragically killed by a bobcat. So I was in a chicken mood. However, if you have no interest in chickens before you read this book, that will probably have changed by the time you’re done.

My Chickens and I

In this Indian children’s book, a very young Muslim girl named Zuni hides with her family from the violence of Partition inside the walled garden of a mosque, and finds not merely a refuge but a whole new world, just the right size for a little girl to explore. She lines the ceiling of their hut with peacock feathers, picks fresh chilies and oranges, watches a peahen raise her family, and finally ventures out to see how the world outside has changed.

Though terrible things happen in the background, this is not remotely an awesomely depressing book. Zuni focuses, as children often do when they’re not personally suffering, on the beauty and freshness of her new surroundings and on the adventure of living a completely different life. Because the story is told from her point of view, it’s rewarding reading for both a child, who can see the whole story as she sees it, and for an adult, who will catch the ironies and the perspectives of her family that Zuni is far too young to understand.

I suppose the book could be criticized for not being dark enough, given the premise – people die, but no one Zuni knows well, and she’s more excited over getting laddoos after spending months without a single sweet – but I thought it was a plausible depiction of a child's point of view. (I also liked Hope and Glory, in which an English boy experiences the Blitz as a grand adventure.) When I read it, I was only a little older than Zuni and identified with her completely.

This was one of my favorite books when I was a child living in India, but I lost it when I moved back to the USA. I finally located a copy and re-read it, twenty-five years later. It was just as lovely and evocative as I recalled, full of sentences so simple and perfect that even as a ten-year-old, I understood that it was beautifully written. Desai’s images – earth baked by the sun into shiny pink tiles, a friend’s precious toy (a set of chipped clay mangoes), a glass of warm sugared water scented with roses - stayed with me for many years.

My original copy either didn’t have illustrations or had different ones, but I liked the realistic drawings by Mei-Yim Low in this edition.