THE WASHINGTON POST – Marsi Parker Darwin and husband Bill live on a Michigan no-kill farm with dogs, cats and various birds, including chickens, peacocks and ducks.
Darwin vividly recalls the day 21 years ago when one of the chicken eggs that was supposed to hatch looked rotten, and had been abandoned by its mother hen. She picked it up and was about to toss it into a pond for turtles to eat, when she heard a small chirp.
“I heard a second chirp, and I realised that the chick was alive and didn’t seem to have an egg tooth to get out of its shell,” she said, referring to the part of the beak a chick uses to crack open the egg from the inside.
Darwin looked closely and saw a tiny, barely visible crack, so she decided to give the chick a little help.
“I gently peeled her out of the egg, and there was this wet little mess, sitting in my hand,” she recalled.
She tried to put the baby chick back with the mother hen, but she wouldn’t accept her. So Darwin took the chick inside, put her under a heat lamp and taught her to eat and drink.
She named the brown speckled girl Peanut because she grew to about a pound, roughly one-third the size of some of her other chickens.
More than two decades after Peanut was peeled from her shell in 2002, she is still hanging out in Darwin’s living room, often in her lap. And the bantam hen is now earning recognition: Guinness World Records has named her the world’s oldest living chicken.
“The average chicken lives five to eight years, so it’s quite the achievement,” said Darwin, 71, a retired librarian who lives in Chelsea, Michigan, near Ann Arbor.
“Peanut is a sassy little chicken – if she doesn’t get her blueberry yoghurt in the morning, I definitely hear about it,” she said.
She and her family celebrated Peanut’s 21st birthday in May, but Darwin said she was still surprised her little hen was named the world’s oldest chicken.
“She’s healthy and she’s spoiled,” she said.
