The Bad Egg

I found a worm in the backyard today. Decided to feed it to my two-week old chickens. Oh. My. God.

They’d never seen a worm before, but Wanda knew just what to do. She grabbed it from the palm of my hand and ran to the corner of the chicken run with the worm’s body dangling almost to the ground (cause, you know, these are baby chicks still). Well Wanda running let Frida and Flo know that she’d latched on to something really good. They chased after her, saw the worm and went berserk!

Imagine 3 chicks racing around the inside of the run, playing keep away. Hopping, squawking, flapping. They were the most active I’d yet seen. And vicious!

After about a minute of Wanda trying to keep the worm to herself, Frida went over and didn’t even try for the worm, but yanked out a feather from low on Wanda’s neck instead. I watched the violence happen right in front of me, no way that Frida was aiming for the worm and missed–she was aiming for Wanda!

Wanda didn’t give up though. She squawked in outrage, but kept a firm grip on that worm.

Of course, as we all should know from watching Looney Tunes, giving one worm to three chickens is just asking for a tug-of-war.

I got down on my knees to watch, almost in disbelief–were they really going to re-enact a cartoon right in front of my eyes? That stuff wasn’t all made up and dramatized to entertain children?  No. No it wasn’t. Worms turn on the bloodlust in chickens.

After all three chickens latched on … streeeeeeetch! The worm disappeared into their respective throats in less than ten seconds.

Which brings me to my most recent hypothesis: chickens are miniature velociraptors. That is, those people who made the Jurassic Park movie, they must have had some chicken trauma in their childhood. They knew exactly what would strike fear best: monster-sized, scaled-over chickens.

Photographic evidence:

I will post more photographic evidence as I obtain it.

Also, did you know that if you google “Chickens and Worm”, among other variations, not a single quality image comes up of multiple chickens tearing a worm apart?

I may try to remedy that for, you know, educational and scientific documentation purposes.