Autumn Hit Our Yard Like a Truck

Deep red Japanese maple leaves glowing in the evening sun.

Japanese maple leaves turning fiery red and orange over our deck in the backyard.

Witch hazel and maple leaves turning gold and red.

A little blueish snail on some fallen leaves.

Jasper and Lapis, two of our extremely mini serama chickens, havin’ a grand old time in the leaf litter.

Bismuth, our other little serama lady.

And last but not least, my little shoulder vulture, Peridot. She also likes the pretty Fall leaves and spends as much time as possible hopping around in them while muttering to herself. She pecked me in the eye about ten seconds after I took this picture, and she’s not sorry.

The Plague Chicken

Sometimes you just have to go full morbid to cope with living through a worldwide natural disaster that just won’t end. Here’s my little friend, the Plague Chicken. She started out as a mostly normal sketch of one of my turken chicks, but rapidly turned into a disturbing monster. (More than the usual for those pocket velociraptors, anyway.)

She’s surrounded by herbs and flowers that were used during the black plague to ward off dangerous miasmas, and she’s absolutely done with everyone’s shit. Wear your masks, everyone!

A cross between a normal chicken and a plague doctor monster drawn in black ink. She’s surrounded by lavender, borage, poppies, roses, rosemary, and thyme.

In case you were wondering how much I stretched reality, this is one of my bantam turkens. They’re quirky. (Pictured: a small dark chicken with no feathers on her face and neck, perched on a human hand. She kinda looks like a vulture, a quail, and a vintage flapper girl somehow made a baby.)