I'm Sleepy

Chickens that live on a regular diet of chicken feed probably spend their daylight hours somewhat differently than mine. I don’t know that, for I have never observed a flock of chickens that dined on commercial meals. Mine, I require to hunt and scratch for their own food. They are six-months-old and have been doing this since they were month-old chicks. They thrive on the food they scratch up for themselves. From the time I let them out of the coop at daylight until they go to roost at dusk, all they do is hunt, scratch, eat what they find, and occasionally sip drinks from the backyard cattail pond. When they have satisfied their appetites, they find a good spot, and hunker down for a nap. This is the pattern of their activity all day. Well, that’s not quite all that the boys do these days. The cockerels are at that adolescent stage where, like all adolescent males, they strut around, love to do a lot of crowing, fight each other, and chase pullets. Pure adolescence . Every day I see them sleep. I don’t close their coop until they are asleep on their roosts. To get to the point, I know that chickens sleep, but never before had I seen a chicken yawn. It astonished me. For the past half hour I had been shooting photos of my chickens, trying to get a shot characteristic of each of the five different breeds in my flock. I saw this little half-grown Brahmaputra and got him in the camera’s viewfinder. He was looking straight into the camera. I was about to shoot his picture when, to my great surprise, he yawned. Although I’m in my seventies, my reaction time was good enough to snap the camera at the full yawn. Continuing education. I learned that chickens yawn.