Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Profiles: Littles Rockette

Littles is a sweet, skittish chicken. Her older sister Biggie is constantly getting all the treats, all the attention, and all the publicity. Littles prefers to quietly graze on grass in the background, nervously eyeing the other chickens, the dog, the sky, the ground, and anything else that might somehow pose a threat to her existence. You can see in this first photo that Biggie is hogging the shot, while Littles is lost in a sea of chickens in the back. Typical.

Don't get me wrong. She isn't named for "Chicken Little" as you might think. She is named because her big sister got spontaneously named Biggie, and Littles just seemed like a nice counterpart. We considered "Smalls" but "Biggie Smalls" is the name of a rap star (I think) and that did not appeal to me. The pluralness of her name, Littles, is just because I thought it was a better name that way.


She is a curious bird- much more so than some of her fellow hens. But if I had to guess where she is on the pecking order, I would say she is only above Zippy and Beldar, and below Biggie, Mrs. Tweedy, and Rosie.


Littles' head is smaller than Biggies. I know that sounds funny but the most noticeable side effect of that fact is that Little's eyes are kinda bugging out of her head. Subtle, but funny, and it adds to her nervous persona. The other thing is that Littles' head feathers are darker and denser than Biggies'. She looks more black with white stripes, while Biggie is sort of really dark grey with really light grey stripes.


I looked through my past photos and discovered that there are two kinds of photos of Littles- ones where I am not sure if it is Littles or Biggie, and ones where both of them are in the picture. So I set out today to get some good pictures of her. The three shot sequence that I captured is the result of cheese-baiting her. Mmmmmm... cheese... I think it is pretty funny. She came, she pecked, she left.

Littles Rockette will lay large brown eggs and should be a steady hen in bad weather and cold winters. Even if she isn't a big clown like her sister Biggie, we still think she is very cool.

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