Saying Goodbye...

The time has finally come to say goodbye to Nashville. The Rooster and Mother Hen are moving to a new coop in Knoxville.

But not to worry, The Ladies have found a new home (and new names, we hear) in an upscale carriage house. That's right! The Ladies are still Nashville Chicks through and through.

And here's a picture of Mother Hen checking out the new digs. As you can see, the new coop is much snazzier (and Mother Hen is much more motherly).

To get a fuller appreciation of the new home, check out the 360-degree view below...

Nugget is a...

Mother Hen and The Rooster went for their 20-week ultrasound yesterday. Nugget is developing well and is on track to be a big baby. We also learned Nugget's sex, clues to which are visible in the picture at left. If you're not sure on how to read the ultrasound, the movie below should clear things up...

Smart Chickens!

Have you ever sat on your back porch and wondered just how intelligent those chickens really are?  Apparently, some of them are pretty smart...

Introducing... NUGGET!

Mother Hen and The Rooster are proud to announce the impending arrival of a new addition to the family--Nugget!

Scotch Eggs!

One of the best things about having chickens is that our friends find it necessary to purchase any galline artifacts they run across in their daily lives. For example, take this Chicken Top Hat and Scarf, meant to decorate the top of any bottle you happen to have in the home.

In our home, this amazing craft decorates a bottle of scotch, making this a prime example of "Scotch Eggs." If you don't yet know the beauty that is scotch eggs, we'd love to have you over some time when we've got the deep fryer out. For now, this is as close as we're getting.

Galline Fashionistas

If you don't know already, industrial egg production is pretty awful. One of the common effects of chicken factories is that the chickens lose their feathers from the cramped cages.

So what's the answer to bald chickens? Knitting them sweaters, of course.

(If you Image Google "Chicken Sweater" you'll get plenty of other examples.)

Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles!

The Rooster was in LA this weekend for a conference and while there made it out to Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. The name says it all. He ate a piece of fried chicken and a waffle. The food was pretty amazing, living up to the standards of a member of Nashville's informal Thursday Fish and Hot Chicken Club.

For a musical introduction to Roscoe's, check out this YouTube video made by one of Mother Hen's friends.

Chickens in NYC!

This past weekend, Mother Hen and The Rooster travelled to the big city for a short vacation and to see the Broadway production of Equus. The play was unbelievable, as was the cheesecake at Junior's afterwards, but the climax of the weekend gallinity was a gift from our friends with whom we were staying. 

They have recently returned from living in Singapore and brought with them a t-shirt for Mother Hen that shows the entire life history of a chicken. Eggs-cellent! For another view of our weekend, check out our friend's blog post on the weekend.

The Saudi Arabia of Chicken

Last night on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert interviewed Richard Lobb, Director of Communications at the National Chicken Council, about the shortage of chicken wings currently afflicting our country. Included in the interview was the breaking story that the United States indeed have a strategic chicken reserve.

We suggest contacting your local Galline Representative and encouraging them to support the release of chicken wings before this Sunday's Super Bowl.

The Ladies have indicated they hope this shortage will break America of what they consider to be a disgusting habit.

Psycho Chicken...

I heard this song this afternoon on WRVU, 91.1 FM. Does anyone else have some good galline parodies? There have to be more out there...

The Chicken Whisperer

Mother Hen's mom forwarded a new story about chickens in her local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

If we had known we could turn this whole experiment into a money making venture, we might've started earlier. With a chick costing around $2.50, you can guess what the profit margins would be when selling to soccer moms.

Chickens in the News

So what does it take to have an article written about you in The USA Today? Apparently, five chickens in your backyard. Maybe we'll add another hen in the Spring and see if any reporters show up. Until then, check out these Backyard Ladies on the West Coast. 

(Thanks to Mother Hen's dad for sending us the link!)

The Ladies and Vaseline

Tonight marks a new first for The Ladies, which means our first blog post in quite awhile. Nashville is looking at some record low temperatures and so we had some friends over after dinner to help us prep The Ladies for zero degrees. As you can see from the pictures, we're all dressed for the weather while out on the back porch. At that point, we were hovering somewhere around fourteen.

The part of the story you would expect is that we put The Ladies in Big Sister's former crate on the porch and covered them with a couple of warm blankets.

The part you might not expect is what we had to do for the combs. Each of The Ladies got a nice covering of petroleum jelly to make sure frost bite doesn't set in.  We'll see if they last the night.

War Wounds

We almost had our own Mike the Chicken today. The Rooster was inside the house working while The Ladies were outside pecking around for their typical afternoon promenade. Suddenly, Big Sister started whining at the back door despite having just gone out. The Rooster got up to investigate and saw only a large hawk perched about fifteen feet up a tree in the backyard, no chickens anywhere.

The hawk flew off but The Ladies remained hidden until The Rooster could coax them out with some scratch; you wouldn't believe how well camouflaged The Ladies are when buried in the hedge. We're not sure what happened, but Ringo seems to have engaged the avian enemy. Whether the interaction was offensive or defensive we'll never know, but Ringo will carry a couple war wounds.

There seem to be no lasting injuries, just a bit of bloody/missing comb and some ruffled feathers.  When returned to the coop, Ringo hid under the nesting box to recover more fully from the shock. Updates will be posted as information develops.

Mike the Chicken

If you know anything at all about chickens, I'm sure you've heard the Story of Mike. If not, read and be amazed. 

(There's also some video coverage of this story on the PBS documentary The Natural History of the Chicken, available at Amazon.)

Apparently, you can even buy Mike the Chicken clothing!

Chicks in a Video

Here's a link to some very cute chicks in a video. 

Of course, you have to watch the whole video to realize I'm not being sexist when I say there are cute chicks in this video.

Flat Chicken

A friend passed this picture along. Apparently, even Flat Stanley is interested in getting a close-up look at a chicken. How anyone got this rooster to cooperate is beyond me.

A New Direction

Just as George stands looking longingly at whatever lies behind that door she can never enter, Nashvillechicks will be taking a new direction. There's not much to report about The Ladies' lives at the moment; they pretty much just eat, peck around the yard, and lay eggs. They're very entertaining in chicken, but not so much online.

Thus, until some important event occurs, we've decided to use this space to talk about other things in the realm of gallinity.  For example, did anyone see tonight's episode of The Amazing Race? Contestants had to enter a Kazahk chicken coop with 30,000 hens and find one of seven golden eggs. If we were to be competing in that Road Block, Mother Hen and The Rooster both think we'd feel much more at home than the contestants seemed to be. If anyone is planning on sending in an audition video, The Ladies would love to make cameo appearances.

As we encounter other galline artifacts in our local lives, we'll be sure to post. It has been recommended to us by some of The Ladies' visitors that Nashvillechicks might be a good spot from which to help others explore the world of Hot Chicken. More on that to come...

First Cousin

The Ladies got a special visit this weekend. Their first cousin came to visit and spent a nice afternoon pointing at most anything that happened. At the moment, The Ladies' cousin knows only two types of animals: dog and not-dog. We hope this weekend visit will add another layer to her knowledge of animalia.

This second picture shows a good close up of all the cousins.

More Eggs... More Visitors!

We had a few more visitors stop by to check up on The Ladies. This first picture shows mom and two kids checking out both the eggs and The Ladies with Mother Hen. The Ladies don't like being held any more than they ever have, but you can corner one long enough to let visitors feel the softness of feathers or see the bigness of feet. Paul was kind enough to let our visitors have an up-close interaction.

This second picture is more common of what happens when trying to chase The Ladies. They tend to hide under some sort of cover, only coming out when offered a bit of scratch. That's also the way we coax them back into the coop.