We are the happy and much entertained owners of four chickens. We brought them home from a local feed store at the very beginning of January; they were three days old.

We had been talking about getting chickens for more than two years. We researched city codes, coop designs and costs. Then, at the beginning of the year, without a coop, without a plan, on the spur-of-the-moment, because they were SO CUTE…, my daughter, PX, and I brought home four baby chickens! There are four of us in our family, so we figured one chicken for each of us.

We purchased four different breeds: an australorp we named Penguino, an ameraucana we named Aragorn, a Rhode Island white we named Frodo, and a buff/golden sex link we named Fanny. So we brought home our chicks AND a very large bag of bedding material, AND a bag of starter feed, AND a lamp for heat, AND a waterer AND a feeder…and we were off – we entered 2012, which we fondly refer to as “the year of the chicken.”

Today I’d like to introduce Frodo. My daughter thinks she is the smartest chicken in the whole world; she IS the smartest chicken in our flock. We first noticed her “watch-chicken” tendencies when we heard her squawking out in the back yard one day.

Chickens have a variety of vocalizations, but squawking is just like it sounds; it’s loud and insistent and follows the pattern:

“buck-buck-buck-buck-buck-buck-ba-kaaaaaaw!” (voice rises in pitch at the end)

My daughter, PX, mimics it per-fect-ly! – really! The chickens will sometimes announce that they have laid an egg with this kind of call. But one day it continued…on and on…and we looked out to inquire and saw a cat slinking across the back portion of our property: not in the chicken yard, but behind it. Frodo was standing at the gate to the back making a big noise: warning the other chickens and warning off the cat!

Since then we have noticed she also “tattles” on the other chickens. If they are where they should NOT be or if they have escaped from the chicken yard…”squawk, squawk”…she let’s us know about it. Her most significant and appreciated action as “watch-chicken” has been when she has alerted us to the nearby presence of a chicken hawk! And we have more than once responded to her call to find a chicken hawk perched very close by.

Frodo is the most tame chicken of our flock because our animal lover, PX, handled her all the time when she was small and she still handles her a lot and daily. She was the first of our flock to begin laying eggs; she began when she was a little over four-months-old. Her preferred place to lay is in some bushes underneath my daughters’ bedroom window. She is also a super grasshopper killer, but more about that another time.