Dirt By Amy Stewart

Dolley and Bess

Here's another painting of my hens, Dolley and Bess. I don't know if you've ever tried to get a chicken to post for a picture, but it's very hard to do. I can get them to sit still by putting out some chicken scratch for them to eat, but then the question is how to make an interesting image out of that. I thought they were very sweet with their heads together like this.

This is 6 x 6 inch oil on board. Click here to bid. You can have a look at my other paintings available on eBay here. Thanks and enjoy the holidays!

Dolley is really my favorite chicken, although I've said that about all of them at one time or another. She's an Americauna and she lays light blue eggs--when she feels like it. As you can probably tell from this portrait, she is the sort of hen who knows her own mind and isn't afraid to tell you what she thinks. She's actually very bossy and makes a point of staying at the top of the pecking order. But she's also quite sweet--she has a distended crop that really needs to be massaged sometimes so the food will go down, and I can pick her up and put her on my lap and massage her crop, and she just sort of closes her eyes and leans up against me.

This is a 5 x 7 oil on board, painted on the half-inch boards with the sides painted black.

Click here to bid. 

I'm also adding her to a growing collection of chicken notecards on Zazzle.com.

Chicken Paintings!

I get a surprising number of e-mails from people who want to know when I'm going to do some more chicken paintings.  Well, good news:  I've got a series of them going up at Lost Coast Daily Painters over the next few weeks.  I usually post on Tuesday, so go check it out if you're interested.  As an experiment, I'm starting bidding at only 99 cents!  What a crazy deal.

And -- yes -- all the paintings are of Eleanor, our Rhode Island Red (seen here in upper right, jostling for position with Abigail for the preferred nesting box on a day when all four of them got eggy at once).  I'm sad to tell you that Eleanor died a few weeks ago--our first hen death.  To our complete surprise, she had cancer--and lots of it--which was discovered after the bird vet put her to sleep and then opened her up to take a look.   We're very sad about it but we're glad she didn't suffer long.  I think the other chickens miss her, too--it's really thrown off their social life to have her gone.

So I've done a series of portraits of Eleanor as a tribute.  She was a fine, dignified hen who didn't go in for tricks and hi-jinks like the other birds do.  She was more of a true barnyard animal, more interested in laying eggs and digging for worms than goofing off and acting like a pet.

My Silly Hen

Usually our chickens go through a very discreet winter moult, losing one little patch of feathers at a time, so you hardly notice it's happening. But not Eleanor.  Poor girl--she seems to have dropped half her feathers at once.  She looks like half a chicken. Fortunately chickens don't spend much time looking in the mirror, so she has no idea how silly she looks.  Also--luckily for her--it has not been terribly cold yet.  I hate the idea of her dropping all her feathers just when she needs them to keep her warm at night.

I Feel Bad About My Neck.

Another sign that autumn is here:  the chickens have started their winter moult.  Poor Abigail is losing all her neck feathers at once. Very undignified.  Not to mention a little punk.

The Girls Review Their Press Coverage

Organic Gardening magazine sent a photographer to the house a few months ago to take some pictures of me and the chickens; the results are in the November issue.  As you can see, the hens were thrilled to see themselves in print.

If you're here just for the chicken blogging, check out the Chickens category.

Those Naughty Hens

We thought we had foiled the chickens' attempts to lay eggs outside their box by clearing out the nest they had made and blocking the entrance to it, but Eleanor stubbornly refused to give up and made herself a new nest under the berry vines, where the tangle of thorns almost prevented us from finding it.  All four hens have been lectured sternly and sent to bed.   I have no idea what's gotten into them.  They've gone quite wild.

Our Naughty Chickens

We had noticed that we weren't getting as many eggs from Eleanor, and we thought it was awfully odd that we got no eggs at all yesterday, but we didn't think much of it until Scott found an egg in the compost pile today.  What was it doing there?  Then he noticed that Eleanor was going off by herself and was hard to find.  That's unusual, because usually when they're free-ranging in the backyard, they stick together.

So after a little investigation, we found this nest behind a tall clump of tansy.  It looks like Eleanor, Abigail, and Bess have all taken to laying an egg in this spot when it suits them.  So the girls were rounded up and herded back into the coop, where they will be spending a little more time over the next few days while they get re-acquainted with the concept of laying an egg in an egg box.  They are, after all, farm animals.  When they go off and start acting like wild birds, building nests wherever they please, it's up to us farmers to get them back in line.

Eleanor--by popular demand!

8 x 10, oil on gessoed board.  Click to bid.

The other day I was thinking about blogs, and how difficult it would have been to start a blog without digital photography.  In other words, what if all this internet stuff had happened, but somehow no one had thought to invent digital photography along the way and we were all still using film cameras, getting pictures developed, scanning them, etc?  It would be impossible for me to run outside and take a picture of the garden and post it online a few minutes later.

So here I am, illustrating my blog with oil paintings. Is that a step backward?  Of course, the oil paintings do have to be photographed... with a digital camera.

Anyway, this is Eleanor, our Rhode Island Red.  And this is the posture I most often find her in, with her head down, digging for worms.  She's my favorite chicken to paint because I love those orange and red feathers.  Of our four chickens, she is really the quintessential barnyard hen.  She doesn't go in for silly little tricks or the other kinds of antics that our other chickens get into.  What she wants to do is get up in the morning, scratch around for food, and lay an egg. She lays lovely, dark brown eggs, and she acts like she rules the roost, although Dolley, one of our Araucanas, is also under the impression that she's in charge of the flock.

Thanks to whoever posted the suggestion about chicken paintings. I'll do a few more.

The Girls!

Lots of people write to me and ask for more chicken posts.  So here, by popular demand, are some pictures of the girls.  There's not a great deal of news to report--they are all healthy and happy, and they spend almost all day free-ranging in the backyard now. 

Dolley had an impacted crop for a while, and then it got very swollen and seemed like it was no longer able to expand and contract the way it needs to in order for food to keep moving along.  But I've found that if I massage her crop, the food gets going and the whole thing seems to start working again.  The funny part is that she really, really seems to enjoy this.  I put her on my lap, give it a little massage, and she closes her eyes and leans up against me.  Perhaps I should give them all massages.

Other than that, everyone is well. We continue to get just about one egg per chicken per day--far more than we can eat. Bess likes to hop up on the windowsill and look in at us when we're in the kitchen.  She seemed particularly interested in the basket of strawberries I had on the counter.  Sometimes all four of them crowd around the window, looking in at us or simply settling down in the shade of the house for a little afternoon nap.