Roundup in chick corral!

In the chick barn at the feed store there's a five-foot-long cattle watering trough in the center of the room set up to be a brooder to nearly 100 yellow-fuzzy Cornish crosses. To clean out the dirty shavings and the water-tower I get to take an enormous peice of corrugated cardboard and "herd" the whole peeping group of alarmed babies into one half of the brooder, then reverse it to clean the other side. A few tough-guy hold-outs get to experience the dreaded HAND -- my human arm lowering, chasing them around, then scoopong them up like a nerf-ball and pitching them back in with the group.

A half-dozen brooders of ducks and geese are set up, and of course the one brooder of bantam chickens. I'm still reading up on my chicken history, but bantams are essentially scaled-down versions of regular chickens. They come in most of he regular "flavors" and varieties (of which there are >130 !!). Why we humans developed miniature chickens may be related to why we created mini poodles . . .? If for no other reason I'd say it's because chicks the size of toothbrush heads are so damn cute you can't stand it. As you might guess, they aren't as popular for purchase as broilers or layers (don't get me wrong, you can broil a bantam, and a bantam hen will lay, Karl suggested humans developed bantams when they were more realistic about portion control!), so when the feed store orders a bath of bantams they usually come in packaged like a Whitman's Sampler, but without the flavor map. A few of every kind. Best guess wins.