The experts who know about such matters tell us that chickens have very keen eyesight, which makes sense if you’re constantly on the lookout for predators that would like to gobble you up, or bugs you would like to gobble up.
“Sight and hearing are a chicken’s two best senses (besides their sense of humor),” Barbara Kilarski writes in Keep Chickens! “They find tasty bugs and grubs by seeing them crawl around in the dirt, or hearing them shuffle under leaves or grass.”
I observed this for myself last week. Twice, in fact, and to my own disadvantage both times.
In each case, our three hens all spotted something edible simultaneously and tried to either steal it or shield it from an impressive offense. What made this interesting is that I could not see what Snow, Nellie and Hope were so eager to wolf down. There they were, running around the pen in unison as if glued together, beak to beak to beak, in hot pursuit of a tiny creepy-crawly that was so small it was invisible to the human eye (or at least to my human eye).
In each case, our three hens all spotted something edible simultaneously and tried to either steal it or shield it from an impressive offense. What made this interesting is that I could not see what Snow, Nellie and Hope were so eager to wolf down. There they were, running around the pen in unison as if glued together, beak to beak to beak, in hot pursuit of a tiny creepy-crawly that was so small it was invisible to the human eye (or at least to my human eye).
I felt left out. No matter how hard I stared at the action, I could not identify the hens' prey, or even spot it. It was beyond my ken, a small reminder that although we humans are at the top of the evolutionary chain, we are not superior to the animal kingdom in all things. Despite our arrogance. And my eyeglasses.
