Captain Falcon!

So the adorable chicks I got last August? Captain Falcon is their Queen. As a baby she was the drabbest, but had a gutsy personality. She actually looked like a tiny bird of prey actually. And she was always the first one to jump onto the box, onto the stick, onto the edge of the box, out onto the floor. I estimated that she was at least a day or so older than the others because they were always just trying out the thing she'd mastered yesterday.

My little brother, assuming that she was a rooster because she was so tough and awesome, named her after this guy. He is a vaguely obscure video game character from the good people at Nintendo.

However, as the chicks developed and 7 out of 10 began to crow (to my lasting dismay), Captain Falcon failed to develop any masculine tendencies. She is a bantam Easter Egger, and she was the first of my flock to begin laying. Her eggs are tiny and blue. They look like robin eggs except slightly too large. I was delighted. Now she has gone broody. Just over two weeks ago I realized that she was trying to hatch one egg that did not belong to her (still not positive who laid it actually) and two golf balls that I put in the nesting box to show the hens where to lay.

I gave her some other assorted eggs (including one of her own, though I don't have high hopes for it as it spent a day in the fridge). They should, with any luck, hatch next week sometime.

Now to hopefully prevent the same karmic disaster that gave me 7 roosters last time, I need some macho names for the babies.

Two of them will be Captain Hammer and Dr. Horrible. If the one from the fridge, "Fridgey" as I currently call it, hatches I will name it Oracle.

I went to my brother for additional suggestions and he came up with Duke Nukem and Rooster Cogburn. I'll skip the last one because fully half the roosters in this country (the half not already called "Foghorn Leghorn" are already named Rooster Cogburn).

I may name one Spock, because I have been on a Star Trek kick lately. More than that I'm afraid to speculate on. She's sitting on nine eggs. It would have been ten, but I broke one while I was checking to make sure she wasn't sitting on extras stolen from other hens. She wasn't. Oops. But 9 eggs of various origins, and at least a few of them should hatch just in time for the Japanese exchange students we're having for two weeks. It is cool. My chickens are awesome.