The Truth About Pullets

There's something the hatchery industrial complex doesn't want you to know. Cute chicks become lovely hens, but in between: there are pullets.

Winona and Ximena are only three weeks out of the egg, so they're technically still chicks. But already they don't conform to the popular notion of chickdom, the idealized one-ounce ball of yellow fluff.

The culture bombards us with images of newly-hatched chicks, as it does with waifish models, in fervent denial about the broad range of chick appearance. Even in my venerable British chicken book, Keeping Chickens: The Essential Guide to Enjoying and Getting the Best from Chickens, chicks older than a few days are banished from view while the tiny babies are paraded across the page.

So these photos are very trangressive. Day by day down is giving way to little practice feathers. First the wings. Now some funky neck feathers. On their way to maturity, chickens are in kind of a permanent molt state, and molting is never pretty.

W and X are still damn cute, as shown. But as they gear up to move outside, they're also galumphing toward the awkward tween pullet stage.

I bear no prejudices against feathering. I just think of them as little chickens now. By that standard, they're still ridiculously small and adorable.

This morning they started using the twiggy little perch I'd set up in their brooder cage. Tonight may come their first stab at roosting.


Crim: What do I do with these?

Camilla: Whoa, holy shit.

Bonus video: First Encounters. Starring Camilla, Winona and Ximena with narration by Crim and special guest cameos.

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