Side Quest: Meet the Ladies

Our bird run is currently dominated by nine laying hens, each with her own personality. These ladies are absolute machines, laying one egg per day—even through the winter. Let’s meet the ladies one by one, starting at the top of the pecking order…

Head Hencho

• Breed: Isa Brown
• Plumage: Red and Gold (the lightest of our Isas)
• Egg Color: Medium Brown
• Quirks: This lady is 100% Girl Boss material. Her throne has been challenged a few times, but no one’s been able to unseat her yet…her throne being the DIY bird waterer: an upside-down 5-gallon bucket. She occasionally lays extra-large eggs—sometimes even over 100g, while the norm is closer to 80g.

Isa

• Breed: Isa Brown
• Plumage: Red and Gold
• Egg Color: Medium Brown
• Quirks: Often enjoys hanging out with the ducks.

Bella

• Breed: Isa Brown
• Plumage: Red and Gold, but with looser feathers than Isa.
• Egg color: Medium Brown
• Quirks: She gets…distracted. Each night, when my son calls all the birds back to the run, she frequently stops for one last bug.

Mrs. White (A.K.A. Bianca)

• Breed: White Leghorn
• Plumage: White
• Egg Color: White
• Quirks: She’s the smallest of all the fully grown hens and the easiest to catch and pick up. Even though she’s always taking dirt baths, she remains the cleanest of our chickens.

Mary (A.K.A. Bloody Mary, A.K.A. Zombie Chicken)

• Breed: White Leghorn
• Plumage: White
• Egg Color: White
• Quirks: This little lady clawed her way back from the brink of death, earning the nicknames Bloody Mary and Zombie Chicken. She’s not the prettiest chicken in the flock—she’s missing many of her neck feathers from her near-death experience—but she’s a survivor. She’s also second in the pecking order, right behind Head Hencho.

Brownie

• Breed: Speckled Sussex
• Plumage: Brown with Flecks of Black and White
• Egg Color: Light Brown
• Quirks: All her feathers are soft and silky with her darkest black feathers actually shining bright green in the sunlight. Her ride-or-die is our next lady, Stormwing.

Stormwing

• Breed: Silver-Laced Wyandotte
• Plumage: Black and White
• Egg Color: Light Beige
• Quirks: Easily the prettiest chicken in our flock, Stormwing is the best at jumping and flying. She loves perching on my middle child’s shoulder and enjoys roosting atop the coop during the day.

Goldie & Hei-Hei, The Dynamic Duo (A.K.A. We can barely tell them apart…)

• Breed: Rhode Island Red
• Plumage: Red
• Egg Color: Light Brown
• Quirks: You won’t find one without the other. They always stick together. They like to pretend they’re the head hens, but then they get hen-pecked…

From Girl Boss to Zombie Chicken, each of these ladies brings her own energy—and a fresh egg—to our homestead daily.

The ladies may rule the roost, but they’re only part of our feathered flock. Meet the whole crew in Flocks of a Feather.

P.S. Thanks a million to my middle child,—the official caretaker of the birds—for filling me in on the quirky information for a few of the ladies I don’t know as well and for helping identify a few of the harder-to-tell-apart ladies.