I donated to Wikipedia, yes I did.

One of my favorite things in scifi stories is

when the heroine has an instant connection to

The Information Of The Universe.

I always wished I had that.

And so I am a big fan of wikipedia.

And while I do understand that we should take what we find on the internet

with a grain of salt...

and yes I do now know the origin of that saying

because I looked it up on WIKIPEDIA!!!!...

I have found Wikipedia to be pretty durn accurate.

Except maybe for things like this...

Because a rooster's comb is not a location in California,

But never mind that now, I'm blogging.

And so when Wikipedia started their annual fund drive, I could no longer ignore it

like I do with NPR.

National Public Radio regularly makes me mad,

but Wikipedia is my friend,

so I donated.

It was easy.

It felt gooooood.

And also a big thank you to all the unpaid contributors who are the backbone of the system.

And a big raspberry to all the nay-sayers dissing the organization...

Thank you Wikipedia!

How Often Should A Blogger Blog?

I know, from numerous sources, that the key to blogging is

posting regularly.

So, does that mean often?

Or does that mean at even intervals?

Because,

Haley's Comet passes the earth regularly... every 75 years.

If Haley's Comet was blogging,

then I'd be kickin' Comet tail on my posting schedule.

I'm posting much more often than that.

Regular blogging with terrific content, that's the key...

and I say, if that regularity is also frequent,

and the content really is terrific,

then that's just an invitation to distracting my readership

from something else they might be trying to do at the time.

So it's really quite considerate of me to post so infrequently.

I have big plans to post awesomely. It's just that someone dropped Christmas right at the end of December with no warning whatsoever, after already having sprung Thanksgiving on me.

Happy End of the Year to Everyone - and Cheers to a Blogging Great Year Coming Up!

October 14th 2011 is World Egg Day!

The International Egg Commission has declared that the second Friday in October is World Egg Day! So that's October 14th!

While I don't want to eggsagerate or minimize the importance of a world egg day, I do feel compegged to mention that the International Egg Commission is a lobbyist group based in Washington DC and charged with promoting the sale of eggs. They are funded, or used to be, by mandatory contributions from egg-producers of a certain size.

I think that is just the kind of organization who should begin to take the egg-food-justice issue to lawmakers in DC, and begin to make changes to our mass-produced food industry system that result in humane conditions for all living beings.

I'm pretty sure this is not eggactly how the International Egg Commission eggspected me to crow about World Egg Day - but then again, they shouldn't count their chicks before they hatch.

Eggs are awesome in every way - and they are best by far from a local humane farmer or the backyard of a neighbor.

Happy World Egg Day!

An Ode To Roosters

Me n these ducks want to post an Ode To Roosters.

I'm not a rooster-hater,
honest. Fur reals.
But I am also not a rooster-lover.

I've seen loving roosters on TV.
There was this one lady with three roosters who were absolutely loving on her.
They were like cats, practically purring.
And I don't think it was CG or animatronics.

I admired my roosters and I was impressed by their courageous care of the hens.
I was not impressed by their courtship habits, but staying in the positive.... I was overwhelmed by their beautiful magnificence.

It was just that after I was attacked and injured for the first time by a rooster, I never trusted one again.
Same goes for geese... I'm not the bag lady feeding them at the park - that's someone who is off her meds.

How can a rooster, who is, after all, just a chicken... injure an adult human?
Well... it goes like this.

First, they start to practice their crowing.
This usually gets an adult human in trouble with the neighbors,
but let's assume this is a farm rooster.

Then, once they are very good at crowing.... they will do it constantly and round the clock,
Keeping the adult human up at night and causing brain shrinkage due to sleep deprivation.
But again, let's assume this is a farm where the rooster is a proper distance from the bedroom - which was not my farm but anyway...

Once they are crowing day and night, they will stage the first blind ambush.
At first, it feels like someone threw a chicken at the back of your leg... like for a laugh.
Just walking through the pen, and whump - a chicken has bounced off the back of your leg.
Silly chicken.

The next blind ambush will be more than just a whump,
It will be a crunching swishing whumpity STAB,
Where the Stab begins to hurt... probably hasn't broken the skin,
But it hurt.

This is the part where the rooster has begun to figure out how to use his spurs.
And how to attack without falling over,
And how to come atchu again while you are bending over trying to see if there's a rip in your pants.

That's when the rooster gets airborne and goes for the face,
Spurs first,
And that can open a cheek to the bone.

Then the whumping sound comes from the rooster getting bounced off the business end of a boot.... which starts as self defense but skirts the dark edge of revenge.

At that point, it's not funny anymore. Especially if there are small, medium or large children involved. At that point an adult human can, and has in my case, sustain a significant injury. Those spurs can slash, stab, or cuisinart.

That's generally when the Free Rooster offer comes in.
As I've said before.... There's A Reason The Rooster Is Free.

And that's my experience with roosters.
I'm a believer in rooster loving. But....
but....

Super Great Urban Chicken Sites... another one

Portland, Home of the Uber Urban Chicken Movement!

Hey, I live in Portland!

Pacific Northwest chickens…!

www.TheCityChicken.com is a wonderful site of articles and answers and images and advice and links and super mega cool chicken stuff. Katy Skinner runs the site and also runs the yahoo group for city chickens, which is live and robust and full of excellent dialog. It's a great place to ask a question, and there's a Portland connection but I can't find the exact fact of that connection right now so I'm going to admit that and move on. This is such a great site... and I depend on that group to keep a eye on the urban chook world, even if I am a self-confessed lurker and read more than I post.

Well done www.TheCityChicken.com!

The City Chicken site hosts a flock of info and fantastic pictures and articles and info and… seriously, with all this info now out there, how is a newbie supposed to learn the hard way anymore?

Of course, the difference between watching someone pick up a chicken and doing it myself remains the thing that keeps me humble.

The yahoo group is active, and very helpful. People posting questions and answers and support - I highly recommend.

I can’t stop scrolling through the pictures. I’m supposed to be writing this blog but I’ve gotten lost at The City Chicken . com…. Hey, there’s bumper stickers available too. Hey - there’s chicken coop info with pictures and how-to on defeating raccoons! ARrite, I’m gone… there’s a bantam tractor I’ve got to oogle at for a while.

Summer Chickens, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Summer... time of sunshine, breezes, droning bees....
and fugly chickens.

It's a pretty good bet that most everyone's coops are full of chooks that look nothing like the glossy, sleek, varigatedly stunningly iridescently breathtaking birds that lived there in the spring.

Most everyone now has half-naked chickens,
copping a sunburn on their bare puckered skin.

Except for one or two - who are feathered because they are so busy running around de-feathering everyone else that no other chicken can get a peck in sideways.

But we should not assume that the rattiest taggliest looking hen is the worst producer. In fact, it is very likely that the ugliest hens are the best layers. All of their energy is going into the eggs.

The comb is a good indicator of laying production... if it is full and healthy looking, that's a good sign. And if the feathers are sparse, the legs are pale yellow (except in black leggers...) that might all be indicative of a great hen.
Or one that's about to die, but there's the rub with chickens.

So, not that anyone out there is actually culling their flock, in this age of Half of the Circle of Life... (given that butchering is illegal in most areas where urban chicken farmers farm)... but if anyone were culling their flock,

The ugly chicken may well be the best chicken.
Suspect the beautiful ones - they may be doing something un-good-hen-ish that is feeding their beauty.
Actually, that probably goes for humans as well.

Chickens in the Backyard

I do very much like domain names that plainly state what they are about.

Not that my site www.TheFeatheredEgg.com doesn't come right out and say it... feathers and eggs, you see.

And not that www.TheFreeRooster.com doesn't also banish confusion... other than the fact that I offer no free roosters here. (But I do tell you that There Is A Reason The Rooster Is Free...)

So www.BackyardChickens.com pretty much says it all.

It is one of the strongest current urban chicken sites on the internet and is run by Rob Ludlow, whom I do not know. He is one of the authors of Raising Chickens for Dummies (with Kimberly Willis, whom I also do not know)

It is an absolute clutch of coop designs. A motherlode of Breed info. Check OUT this breed selector tool! (okay, I just lost an hour to the breed selector tool and I’m not even in the market for new chicks darn-nit! There’s such a thing as too cool.)

Hey, a recipes section… this is my kind of site. Not just chicken love but chicken life… cycle. That’s the delicate border between pet and purpose where I keep losing tailfeathers.

www.Backyardchickens.com is like a download from the movie The Matrix. Plug in and come out a chickspert. Well, at least until I walk out to my future-yes-I-will-have-them-again pen… then reality reasserts itself and a chicken takes me down.

I happily add this site to my online coop tour of way-cool chicken websites.