A bird’s eye view
I adore this photograph. It was pure chance that it turned out as good as this. All the ladies were looking at my hand emerging from inside the hen-house holding my iPhone at an odd angle. I snapped away blindly in the hope of getting a worthwhile shot. It was only afterwards I realised that if I’d taken my Nikon D40X outside with me, I could have got a much better resolution and the image could then have been blown up to A3 size and proudly framed. I can’t do that with a photo snapped using the iPhone’s paltry two-megapixel camera, it’d just end up fuzzy. Ah well. I’m definitely going to take more shots from inside the hen-house in the future!
tags: bird's eye view, buff orpingtons, hens, Jubilee Orpingtons, lavender araucanas, Light Sussex, livestock, pets, poultryMeet the Jubilee Orpingtons
Jagger is one of our two Jubilee Orpington hens, and is around 26 weeks old. All Orpingtons are notoriously slow to reach maturity, so it’s likely we won’t be getting any eggs from Jagger or her sister, Whitney, until early next year. Perhaps by then they will have grown the wattles (below the beak) and comb (on top of the head) common to most but not all breeds of chicken, and will look less like birds of prey.
In the photo above you can just about make out the beginnings of these features. There’s a distinctly falcon-ish appearance to their heads right now, and unlike the Buff Orpingtons, or any of our other hens, the Jubilees have really hard, thick and big skulls. Jagger is so named because she’s so far displayed a rock star attitude by squawking loudly, occasionally trashing the inside of the hen-house and, when she first arrived, she tried to total our kitchen.
tags: buff orpingtons, eggs, hens, hierarchies, Jubilee Orpingtons, livestock, pecking order, pets, point of lay, poultry
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