Chicken Bomb

 Oh...terrific. Pele, one of two hens in the house right now due to all the wildfire smoke, has decided that now, yes--NOW is the perfect time to molt. Pele has a congenital respiratory issue that causes her to wheeze very badly when it gets smoky like this, so for the time being she's in the house, occupying one of our bathrooms. The other hen is 9 year old, mostly blind Wiggles--the rooboys have decided that she is a GILF and have been after her too much, so she's keeping Pele company. This super-heavy smoke is expected to last at least another week, lucky us.

So here's what we woke up to this morning, which prompted a loud, involuntary 'Oh, God!' from me...feathers creeping out into the hallway.

Pele has chosen her spot (as humans we have -zero- say in this, the chicken will simply return to the chosen spot again and again like some sort of weirdo farmer's perpetual motion thing the minute your back is turned), up on the counter so she can admire herself in the mirror--chickens love gazing at themselves. So more feathers adorn the countertop.

The rest of the bathroom is beginning to swim in feathers, all we can do is clean them up and wait for the inevitable Pele-bomb to come...because Pele is one of those chickens who only indulges in a HARD molt--we're talking uber-creepy, naked chicken here.

Going by what she's done in the past, this is what we'll have to look forward to in a week or so:

YEAH--can't wait.

Smoke Gets In Your...Well, Everything

So right on the heels of the Tamarack fire, which burned to within 4 1/2 miles of us, comes the Caldor fire!

We had lots of smokey nastiness from the Tamarack fire, then the Dixie fire...but Caldor seems to want to up the ante and show what it can do.

Just for reference, normally our backyard, coop & skies look like this: 

Today, our air quality went to shit and by 2PM it looked like this:

It only got worse from there.

At 4PM the air quality climbed into the dark purple 'Hazardous' range (the worst it can get) at 488.

And at that point things took a turn for the surreal. Our normal time for full dark this time of year is 8-9PM. Today it got full dark at 4PM--all due to the Caldor fire smoke. Bear in mind that this fire is 35 miles away from us. The light flecks in the photos are raining bits of ash. The same view as above, out my back door towards the chicken coop at 4PM.

You can almost see the chicken coop, below. The chickens were so addled at this point they didn't go to roost in the coop as they normally do when it gets dark, they just sat down wherever they were in the yard. The kid and my husband went out and picked them up one by one and stuck them in the coop.

The view from my front porch, looking across the street at 4:45PM. Full dark at this point, the flash fired. Fairly heavy ashfall.

It stayed like this, only lightening a bit at 6PM. This is the same shot as the one above. My daughter said it looked like the sun went down and then came back up...except it was rising in the southwest.

All of this is absolutely unreal, never in my life have I seen anything like this, and hope I never do again.