This year's Mystery Chick continues to be mysterious. It is black-and-whitish with Egyptian kohl-rimmed eyes. It has greenish-blue legs like our Araucanas, but doesn't otherwise resemble them. It is larger than most of the chicks. Any ideas?
In the other half of Chicken House #2, the geese and turkeys have been coexisting much more happily than you'd expect. The geese are (and have always been) several times larger than the turkeys, so the group looks like 4 Gullivers and 11 Lilliputians. We watched them carefully at first to make sure the geese weren't picking on the turkeys, and we were pleased to note that they all seemed to get along quite well. The only real downside is that the turks have a sort of spiky look to them, because the geese get them wet and sticky by grooming them and otherwise drooling water on them.
Now the geese are large enough that they could theoretically go outdoors--maybe with the ducks, we're still ironing that part out. But it seems a shame to separate the geese from the turkeys, since the turks seem to have gotten the idea that the geese are their parents. They imitate the geese, extending their necks to "honk" irritatedly when we visit:
And they sleep curled up on, under, and against their larger, downier friends. It's heart-meltingly adorable. I wish I could show you, but the geese always wake up and honk at the camera.
I suppose eventually they will have to be separated, because turkeys really don't enjoy splashing around in a kiddie pool. The geese are going to want to, pronto, when they get more feathers.
