Chicken Communication
By Natalie Croak (04/24/13 09:39:24)
Related animal: Chicken

Outside the back door to my apartment is my co-op’s chicken coop, home to Gumbo, Speckles, Abe Lincoln, Uma Thurman, Pot Pie, and Brianne of Tarth. I never really pay attention to the chickens so I decided to attempt to communicate with them. My roommate used to be the chicken manager, or “chicktator,” so I decided to try to communicate with them with no previous knowledge of the chickens so I wouldn’t be biased. Then afterwards I talked to her to see if I had “the gift.”
I sat on the edge of one of the garden beds for about a half an hour watching them and attempting to communicate. I tried to open my mind to the idea of interspecies communication and wrote down everything that came into my head. Our smallest chicken Pot Pie has a metal tag around her leg and I sensed that it bothered her. Other things that I picked up on were that they wanted more fresh food instead of chicken feed and they wished more people would hang out in the backyard. I’m a skeptic of animal communicators however, and I think that this was just me projecting my own ideas of what they would be thinking about onto the chickens. However I did sense that Gumbo’s right wing was bothering it and later when it ruffled her feathers I noticed a bald spot on its right side.
While I was out there I noticed that one of our chickens Abe (named for her burly feather beard) was really working to get my attention. Whenever I would move around to get a better view of another chicken she would follow me around and get in the way when I would try to take a picture. She ended up photo-bombing almost every shot.
Afterwards I talked to my roommate about what I thought the chickens had told me. When I told her that Pot Pie wanted the tag taken off her leg she got mad and said that she tried to take it off when we rescued Pot Pie from the shelter but she kept running away and scratching her. She also said that Gumbo’s bald spot was just normal molting but maybe that’s an uncomfortable process for chickens. I decided that I going to try to go out to the chicken coop more often with my leftover vegetables for them to eat since that was their biggest request.



Inside of their laying box--Abe is still trying to get in the picture

The beautiful Uma Thurman

Abe photo-bombing Pot Pie's picture
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