I need to talk about small chickens. Not as a bit, not as a quirky aside. I mean as a genuine area of joy and enthusiasm in my life that I have been underselling for too long. The small chickens trend on TikTok, ChickenTok in general, the bantam appreciation corner of the internet, I found it months ago and it has done more for my mental health during long recording sessions than most things I could name.
My aunt Deb has a coop out back of her property. She's in a small town about four hours from where I live now and it's one of the things I look forward to most when I go back. Not the town necessarily. Not the complicated feelings of being a person who left. Aunt Deb's coop. The birds. They are small and they are chaotic and they have more personality per square inch than most creatures I've encountered and I mean that as genuine admiration.
Here's what the internet has taught me that I didn't fully appreciate in childhood: I was in the presence of greatness this whole time and I didn't properly recognize it.
what actually happens at aunt Deb's coop
Aunt Deb keeps a mixed flock, which means sizes and breeds are all over the place. She's got some standard-size birds and she's got some bantams. bantams are the small versions, for the uninitiated, either naturally small breeds or miniature versions of larger breeds, and they are extraordinary. She's had bantam cochins, which are these fluffy round little creatures that look like they were designed by someone who asked an AI to make a chicken as adorable as possible. She's had bantam Old English Game hens, which are the opposite, small and extremely decisive about their opinions.
The thing about small chickens specifically is the attitude-to-body-size ratio. You get a bantam rooster, these things are the size of a pigeon, and they will absolutely square up to a dog twice their weight. Not successfully usually, but with complete conviction. There is zero awareness of proportion in a bantam rooster. He has decided that his domain extends as far as he can project his intentions and the laws of physics are not his concern. I find this deeply relatable.
Aunt Deb has names for all of them. The naming conventions shift slightly every generation but there is always at least one hen named something like "Mavis" or "Claudette" that has a reputation in the flock. Mavis III currently is, according to Deb, "the smartest bird I've ever kept and also the most annoying." She will hop to the fence line when you approach, look you dead in the eye, and issue a sound that is not quite a cluck and not quite a complaint but is definitely a comment. She has thoughts. She expresses them. I respect it entirely.
Why ChickenTok Hit Me During a Recording Week
I want to give you the specific context here because it matters. I found ChickenTok, or rather ChickenTok found me via the algorithm, during a week when I was deep in a writing spiral that wasn't going well. I was trying to get a lyric right that kept slipping away from me. You know the feeling: you can hear the shape of what you want, you can feel the emotional temperature it should hit, and you're just cycling through wrong versions of it, filling a whole notes app with lines that almost work and don't.
It was about 11 p.m. and I took a break and opened TikTok and the first video was a woman narrating her bantam Silkie's personality like a nature documentary. The Silkie in question was doing almost nothing, just being a small fluffy cloud of a bird moving around a yard, and the narration was completely committed, completely serious, absolutely hilarious. I watched it three times and then watched the next five videos in her feed and found I had actually laughed out loud, which I hadn't done in probably twenty-four hours.
Then I went back to the lyric and it came out in about fifteen minutes. Make of that what you will. I'm not saying bantam videos unlocked a creative valve. I'm saying I was too tense and the chickens helped and then I wrote the song. Causation, correlation, whatever. The chickens are getting partial credit.
The Specific Personality Traits I Am Taking As a Blueprint
I'm going to be honest with you about something: I have thought at length about bantam chicken personality as a model for how to move through the world and I'm not embarrassed about it. Here's what they've got figured out:
Complete confidence in proportion-defying circumstances. Bantam chickens do not wait for external validation that they are big enough, important enough, loud enough to take up the space they want to take up. They simply take it. They assess the situation, decide what they want, and proceed. The size discrepancy between their ambition and their body is not, from their perspective, a discrepancy at all.
Loud and specific opinions communicated freely. A chicken who disagrees with something will let you know. A chicken who finds the food arrangement suboptimal will say so repeatedly until the situation is addressed. There is no pretending everything is fine when it is not fine. I am working on this personally. I have the instinct but I have years of training toward quieting it that I'm still untangling.
Genuine joy in very small things. Aunt Deb's birds react to good weather, to finding a particularly good patch of ground to scratch in, to the arrival of mealworm treats, with something that looks exactly like uncomplicated delight. No hedging, no "I shouldn't be this excited about mealworms," no self-consciousness about enthusiasm. Full-body response to a good thing. That's the move.
The flock thing, being opinionated and individual but also genuinely belonging somewhere. Her birds have clear personalities and clear hierarchies and clear preferences and they also clearly function as a group. They don't lose their individuality to the collective. They just also have a collective. I think about that a lot.
What ChickenTok Is Actually About (beneath the obvious charm)
ChickenTok at its best is about paying attention to small lives with full attention. The best creators in that space, the ones who narrate their flocks like they matter, who learn individual chicken personalities and report on them with the seriousness of a beat journalist, they're doing something I think is underrated as a practice. They're noticing. They're treating a small creature's preference for a particular corner of the yard as worthy of observation and care.
I grew up around people who were very focused on the big eternal questions. Heaven, hell, salvation, morality, the fate of souls. There is something to be said for big questions. But there is also something that gets lost when you're always looking at the horizon, you stop looking at what's in front of you. Aunt Deb's chickens are in front of you. The specific face of Mavis III looking at you like she has assessed and found you not entirely worthless, that is in front of you. That is the world.
I have a song in progress right now that has a line in it that I got from standing at that fence line watching a bantam rooster absolutely refuse to be intimidated by a shape he'd decided was encroaching on his space. Just decided: no, this is mine. I will not cede this. Even though the odds were objectively not in his favor. I watched him and thought: there it is. That's the song.
Small chickens. They have my whole heart and apparently also part of my record. I'm not mad about it.
If you're not on ChickenTok yet and you have any tolerance for animals having enormous personalities in small bodies, I highly recommend letting the algorithm find you. It takes about three watches before it commits and after that you're in and it's genuinely one of the better corners of TikTok. Low drama. High entertainment. Occasional philosophical depth if you're paying attention. I've recommended it to several friends going through hard times and the success rate as a mood intervention has been impressive. There's something specifically restorative about watching a creature who weighs less than two pounds march across a yard with complete conviction about her own importance. We could all stand to borrow a little of that energy. Mavis III has it figured out. I'm taking notes.
Going back home in a few weeks. The coop visit is already the thing I'm looking forward to most. Aunt Deb always makes coffee that's too strong and we sit by the fence and watch the birds and she tells me about each one's personality like a progress report. It's one of the more grounding rituals in my life. Some people have church. I have bantam hens and my aunt's very strong coffee and a fence between us and whatever the birds have decided today's drama is about. Good enough. Better than good enough.