Lmao!

We got pet chickens last year. First a hen that wasn’t a hen, but a rooster (and I made a comment recently about him in a different C/). He was at a neighbor’s, but wasn’t being taken care of, so the neighborhood had an intervention, and somehow we ended up with the only rooster in the batch lol.

Anyway, we got an actual hen a few months later because chicken math. But we got her much younger, from someone that hand raises for pets. It was in late October that we got her, so she couldn’t go outside when it was under a given range pf temperature, and rather than putz around, we just kept her inside because we’re right up on the Appalachians, and it’s colder than frosty’s left nut pretty much all day.

So, she’s this cute little black chicken. A little ball of fluff. She’s clicking her little toes all around, pooping and being adorable. She was still being trained to use pads to poo. One day, my back is flaring up, and everyone else goes to run errands, so she’s on the bed with me, on a pad next to me.

She was ignoring me and everything, just preening, until I went through some of my favorite YouTube throat singing videos. Which ended up via algorithm playing an otyken video.

This little bird starts hopping around, peeking over my arm to see what is what. She then proceeds to kinda sing along. Not really singing along, but chirping and going pew-pew the way baby chickens do, and practically dancing.

You know how the one singer does the high parts, where she’s almost screaming? That sent the little pullet into overdrive. She’s bouncing and chirping and jumps on my chest to watch the video.

Well another track comes on by a different artist, and she starts the baby bird version of squawking, which is adorable in itself. Highly upset, pecking the screen until I click the next video by them. She then goes back to happily dancing and singing on my beard instead of the the pad. Which resulted in a happy bird, an entertained me, and a beard with poo on it.

Despite the poo, it began a regular afternoon event for the two of us. We still bring her inside every day because she’s just too damn joyful to have around, and we do get predators in the yard despite the fence (which, since the hurricane has been more often, though the rooster has beat the crap out of anything that gets in, see the other comment I made for that lol).

She comes ruuuuunnnnning through the house as soon as my wife or kid puts her down, jumps on the bed and starts pecking the tablet.

She has her own playlist now. About half of it is Otyken. The rest is a mix of bluegrass, some other throat singing, and some random tracks that she enjoys. She nestles in next to me, on a pad, I prop the tablet up and hit play. She sings and pecks and sometimes gets up and dances around happily.

We do that for about an hour, then she takes a nap.

You know what’s absurd though? The only reason I agreed to chickens as pets was because they would be outside, and the kid would handle them. Instead, all winter last year, I had a bird in my beard, and now she follows me around any time we’re inside or outside together.

I kid you not, evening would come, she’d get a little drowsy. She’d hop up onto me and pew-pew at me until I’d lean the seat back so she could get up under my chin, arrange my beard to her liking and sleep there until bedtime. I couldn’t move. Utterly pinned down for an hour or two until it was time for her to go to bed for real.

She’s too big for that now, mostly. And she rarely wants to. But it’s an unusual day where she isn’t cuddled up with me, with her playlist going. When I’m staying elsewhere for one reason or another, she scolds my wife and kid all evening, going back and forth between my spots where we cuddle. She’s got her little perch on the arm of the couch next to me. But, every now and then, she’ll get on my leg and command me to lean back, then climbs up to my beard for a few minutes. It isn’t often, but sometimes she seems to remember it and gets all insistent about it.