The power of cheese
Our little chicken was being such a character yesterday. She's the tiny black Bantam I might have mentioned before, and yesterday I let her out of her coop to wander around in the backyard while I knelt nearby, watching her. She was about an arm's length away from me, and I was eating a stick of string cheese. I recalled how we used to give the chicken pieces of cheese as a treat, so I broke off a tiny piece and dropped it in front of her.

She then started making this high-pitched, squeaky clucking that she makes whenever she's found something interesting when she's scratching around in the dirt and pecks the cheese up. Then she walks over to where I'm kneeling and starts rapidly pacing back and forth beside me, bobbing her head like an inquisitive pigeon and craning her neck to peer up at the cheese I'm still eating. After a few seconds of this, she flaps up onto my lap, so that she is now only a few inches from the cheese she has been coveting. Of course, I had to give her several more pieces then, and she didn't hop back down until the cheese was all gone.

It's at times like these that I suspect that even chickens, with their minuscule brains, are smarter than we give them credit for