How wonderful to hear this story - and good for Rosie! Seems like she has been clear on what she wants and has had the determination to get it from a very young age.Since several has posted pictures of most or all of their present and past flock members I thought I'd do the same in celebration. Keep in mind it will take several posts to get everyone as I have to go in the photo archives to 2018. I am sorting through a few thousand pictures of both the chickens and the horses to get this stuff.
In the beginning.
My current Chicken journey officially began in December of 2018. As a child we had chickens, including my special 2 Dominiques who started and cemented my love for chickens. Life happened, parents got divorced and eventually my biological dad got out of chickens and we were never in a spot to have our own chickens. Fast forward about 20 something years I have my own daughter now and starting around the age of 5 she added chickens to her wish list along with horses. I'm now in a place where technically I could have chickens, but, she was never a big egg eater, and well, as much as I wanted them I saw this just as a phase. She was about 8 when at one of the horse shows 2 chickens escaped and flew onto the hillside when they let them loose in the ring during intermission. This was for the kids called the "Chicken Chase." I will not go into detail about how I hated that, but it was a thing at the horse shows along with them trying to catch a greased piglet. The 2 chickens were a game hen and rooster. I do not know how old they were when they escaped but they were full grown. It upset the guy that owned the chickens, especially loosing the rooster as well......he was known for fighting chickens and wanted them back badly. He tried for a year to catch them and trap them unsuccessfully. They became feral. You would see them or hear them on the hill every few weeks. His brother at the time had the barn and farm leased so he was constantly there, asked me to help, I said I would, but did not. His brother eventually lost the lease to the barn and they left. About this time the Rooster was killed, and he decided to leave the hen alone and let a predator get her as well. Did I mention I did not like this guy? They were gone for about 5 months when someone else took over the barn and they gutted it and re did the thing. During this time I noticed that the hen was starting to come off the hill every few days. Rosie took notice of her and she once again started up hot and heavy on how she wanted chickens. I told her if she tamed that hen she could have chickens. Challenge accepted. She started taking scraps and putting them near the spot she was coming off the hill. The hen began watching for her and would come and eat, you could not get within 20 feet of her before she took off, but it was a start. This went on for a couple months. Rosie was eventually able to drop off the food, call for her and sit on a bucket about 5 feet away and talk to her. The barn got finished, horses moved in and we got asked to take over management and daily care of the boarded horses. That meant that we were there every day for several hours. Rosie started moving her feeding spot to inside the wash bay. The hen followed, you could not touch her yet, but you could talk to her and walk around her without her bolting. She also started laying her egg in the hayloft of the barn. This was not fun as the one thing they did not replace in the barn was the hayloft or death trap as I called it. Due to my reluctance to go find the "easter egg" daily we also discovered this hen was prone to go broody if given a chance. Even in December she tried to sit on a clutch of 10 infertile eggs and when I went to remove them tried to beat me up. You all should know by now who I'm talking about.
Here is one of my first pictures of the old bat. When we began taming her she had already lost the toes of her foot due to a hawk.
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