Pied Beauty

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
                For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
                And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
                With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                                                                                Praise him.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Some of our dappled things — a new batch of mail-order chicks that arrived Tuesday afternoon:



Most of these are layers, Silver-Spangled Hamburgs (the striped ones with the grey heads), and Blue Andalusians (the black/grey/cream and the grey/cream ones). The golden ones are Buff Orpingtons, a dual-purpose breed which we bought as a “straight run” meaning that we didn’t order a particular sex, they just gave them to us as they hatched out. Statistically this means that they should be half male (which will mostly be butchered) and half female (which we’ll keep for layers). The light yellow ones are a straight run batch of Jumbo X Rocks, a heavy meat bird.

This little chickie is my favorite:



(pictures taken Wednesday)