New chicken owner in Oahu

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cundare said:
Just want to introduce myself, and ask for an ID of our hen. I live in rural Oahu, where chickens roam the streets. The roosters often fall prey to kids who capture them for cockfighting rings, which are popular here, despite being illegal.

We never planned to raise chickens, but one day, a red junglefowl rooster wandered into our yard. He was a beautiful bird and quickly took over our yard as his territory. He slept in our mango tree and got to know us over a period of months, and became a friendly, interesting pet. But one day, he was stolen by three local kids. Our video cameras showed how organized they were. Two jumped our gate and cornered our guy on the driveway with a huge fighting cock. While our guy was battling for his life, they grabbed him from behind, passed him to the third kid waiting outside, and then ran off. The whole thing took maybe 45 seconds. We were heartbroken, but resigned to the fact that he probably wound up in a Spartacus-like rooster-gladiator camp. We figured that was the end of our chicken adventures.

However, a few months later, a beat-up Australorp rooster wandered into our yard. He had a bandage on one leg, a tie-wrap (!) on the other, and his feathers were battered. One wing seemed injured and he seemed confused by the fact that he couldn't fly into our tree. We brought him to a vet, built a vertical cage so that he could safely roost in the garage at night, protected from predators, fed him enough for him to gain some weight, and tried to give him a good quality of life that let him behave as naturally as possible. Our best guess is that he was being raised for fighting, but after being injured, his owners threw him into the street to fend for himself. Horrible, but at least they didn't kill him outright.

Despite his disabilities, this rooster is the most good-natured, intelligent pet we could ask for. He's still cautious, but he understands the rules of the house. We let him free-range around the yard. We plugged up holes where he could escape, but he knows that he's not supposed to go outside and makes no effort to do so if somebody leaves the fence open. The worst thing was that we didn't have any other chickens, and being so new to raising birds, weren't sure what we'd have to do to get him some friends. He'd spend a few hours every day crowing to other roosters in the neighborhood.

Then one day, a young hen wandered in, all black, with a black comb & legs. After some initial melodrama, they bonded and they're now inseparable. After a few months of gorging herself on our top-quality chicken food, she started developing color and now looks like a brown leghorn -- although the black comb is still confusing. Like most leghorns, she's skittish and scared of people, but she's come a long way. She now runs toward us when we come out of the house, expecting a treat, and lets us get fairly close without running.

It's amazing to watch the two of them interact. The rooster acts like our "agent," enforcing the house rules. He shows here where chickens are allowed to go and if she jumps a gate to go into a prohibited area, he screams at her to come back. If she doesn't, he runs up to the front door of the house and crows until we come out; he then dashes over to the spot where she got out to enlist our help in getting her back. It's like "Lassie".

My question: I haven't found references to leghorns with black combs, but I'm still new to all this. Can anybody identify the breed of this bird?
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Thanks to everybody for the replies (and warm welcome!) A "game fowl," eh? I'll have to look that up. One thing: She sure is curious, smart, high-strung, and independent. No matter what we do, lately, she's been escaping the property almost every day, for an hour or two at a time. She finds weaknesses in the fences and barriers and squeezes through. We keep closing them up and she keeps coming up with new strategies. I finally managed to follow her yesterday and she seems to be exploring a neighbor's property, where there is some backhoe landscaping going on. I watched her through a chainlink fence (she found a small hole in the fence & squeezed through -- that bird!) and spent an hour nesting in the loose topsoil. She never appeared to be dust-bathing, she just liked to sit in the soil. Then she circled the house for a long time trying to squeeze between slats to get into a crawl space under the house. I finally gave up trying to entice her back. The original theory was that she was going out every day to lay an egg, since we haven't seen an egg on our property since she started escaping. But I didn't see any egg-laying going on yesterday. And she always comes back, although when I watched her yesterday, she almost got hit by two cars (WHY does that chicken the street?) So we've got a problem to solve -- more of a mystery, maybe.
 
cundare said:
Thanks to everybody for the replies (and warm welcome!) A "game fowl," eh? I'll have to look that up. One thing: She sure is curious, smart, high-strung, and independent. No matter what we do, lately, she's been escaping the property almost every day, for an hour or two at a time. She finds weaknesses in the fences and barriers and squeezes through. We keep closing them up and she keeps coming up with new strategies. I finally managed to follow her yesterday and she seems to be exploring a neighbor's property, where there is some backhoe landscaping going on. I watched her through a chainlink fence (she found a small hole in the fence & squeezed through -- that bird!) and spent an hour nesting in the loose topsoil. She never appeared to be dust-bathing, she just liked to sit in the soil. Then she circled the house for a long time trying to squeeze between slats to get into a crawl space under the house. I finally gave up trying to entice her back. The original theory was that she was going out every day to lay an egg, since we haven't seen an egg on our property since she started escaping. But I didn't see any egg-laying going on yesterday. And she always comes back, although when I watched her yesterday, she almost got hit by two cars (WHY does that chicken the street?) So we've got a problem to solve -- more of a mystery, maybe.
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It sounds very much like she is looking for a place to create a nest and brood. Make a place for her on your property that is safe and secure. Some place out of view and on the ground in loose soil. That is what she's looking for.
 
DobieLover said:
It sounds very much like she is looking for a place to create a nest and brood. Make a place for her on your property that is safe and secure. Some place out of view and on the ground in loose soil. That is what she's looking for.
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Here's the strange thing. We had set up a little area where she'd been laying eggs for a few weeks. One day, she just stopped laying there and started jumping the fence. No idea what happened, but it could have been a couple of things. First, we removed a couple of eggs from the "nest." Didn't think that would bother her since she would lay them and then ignore them after. Also, she got scared once when we walked too close to the nest. But that didn't look like anything major. After she started flying out, we created new nesting areas, laying down pads, putting an egg in the area to give her the idea, etc. I think it was obvious to the rooster, who immediately went to the area, scratched in a depression for her to sit in and then tried all morning to get her to go in. She went in once only briefly, and never went back. I trailed her to a neighbor's yard down the street, where she disappears, sometimes for 4 hours a day. There are other chickens in the neighborhood roaming the street, so perhaps she's visiting old friends from before she showed up in our yard. But we still don't know for sure -- many possibilities. One thing, though -- we haven't gotten any eggs since she started going walkabout. Either she's stopped laying, or she's depositing them somewhere down the street where we can't find them.
 

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