Pretty chicken feather pictures
Chickens move their heads pretty fast. I knew that, but it hadn't been hammered home to me until I tried to snap pictures of them. To get the few pictures I put in the previous post, and this post, I must have taken fifty pics. The ones below were a couple that I decided to keep because they show off how beautiful the feathers are on these animals. Keep in mind that the female of the species is considered the less showy. Healthy chickens can be gorgeous creatures.
This last is a four month old Well-Summers pullet (that's a 'girl' to the hen being the 'woman'). Most of the hens in the pictures are six months old and laying eggs. That is a phenomenal growth rate! Game chickens, which is what I'm more familiar with, don't lay eggs until they're a full year old and even that's considered immature. They really need to be two years old before they lay eggs reliably. It's amazing what people have managed to do with consistent, focused breeding efforts on "making" chickens that mature fast.
(Chickens, by the way, will lay eggs without the presence of a rooster. It's like ovulation in humans. You don't need to be having sex to have your period. Sex with the rooster just means the eggs will probably be fertile and *if* the hen sat on them for 28 days, it would hatch into a chick. But if you take the egg right away, then it's no different from any other egg.)
This last is a four month old Well-Summers pullet (that's a 'girl' to the hen being the 'woman'). Most of the hens in the pictures are six months old and laying eggs. That is a phenomenal growth rate! Game chickens, which is what I'm more familiar with, don't lay eggs until they're a full year old and even that's considered immature. They really need to be two years old before they lay eggs reliably. It's amazing what people have managed to do with consistent, focused breeding efforts on "making" chickens that mature fast.
(Chickens, by the way, will lay eggs without the presence of a rooster. It's like ovulation in humans. You don't need to be having sex to have your period. Sex with the rooster just means the eggs will probably be fertile and *if* the hen sat on them for 28 days, it would hatch into a chick. But if you take the egg right away, then it's no different from any other egg.)