Meet Nyup, our 4-year-old Serama hen! Seramas are the smallest chicken breed in the world, and what she lacks in size she makes up for in big personality.

Serama chickens are considered an ornamental breed, meaning they aren’t bred to produce lots of eggs or be meat birds, but rather they’re bred for looks and showiness! There are entire competitions dedicated to finding the best-looking and best-shaped Serama, but because of this they also have such wide-ranging personalities since they’re not exactly bred for what’s on the inside. Speaking on that…

Nyup’s name came from a combination of the words “Nope” and “Yup” which turned out to be a perfect name for her because she is full of contradictions. She always manages to sound grumpy, pretends to not like attention and being held, but settles into your arms and hands as soon as you pick her up (while still sounding grumpy, of course). I need to show you what I mean by her attitude, a single photo won’t do it justice:

But despite her “aggression” she was for awhile the lowest on the pecking order (we’ll meet the other flock members in future posts). This is because Nyup is really more of a lover than a fighter after you get to know her (for anime fans, you might know this as “tsundere”). Suffice to say she was all squawk and no peck.

Here’s a couple “Nyup” moments for you that further show her onion layers of contradiction:

Nyup jumping onto my hand to be held despite her grumbling about it (you jumped on me! I didn’t even pick you up, miss!):

Nyup being incredibly broody. For those who don’t know, broody is when a hen becomes very determined to hatch an egg and be a mama hen, hormones are flooding her body to be more protective than normal. For Nyup, she’s probably trying to hatch an egg for about a quarter of the year. Nyup is by far the the broodiest of the flock, which adds to her grumps:

But because of her broody tendencies she’s also the best mom of the flock. She even adopts other chicks that are abandoned. This is a really cool, specific trait that varies by each individual chicken. There are lots of chickens that only want to raise their own, and then there are some chickens like Nyup, who thinks every baby is her baby and she will adopt any and all who need her. You won’t know if your hen has this trait until she starts raising chicks. This was really cool to discover about her when our other hen, Princess Lay-a, turned out to be a terrible mother who constantly abandoned her chicks. Nyup literally took Princess Lay-a’s chicks under her wing and kept them warm. She’s also a great co-parent.

But! If Nyup is a hen, who lays eggs, and is a great mama, how come she can crow like a rooster? I’m glad you asked. While uncommon, it’s not unheard of for a older, more dominant hens to take on rooster-like traits and roles in a roosterless flock. This includes crowing like a rooster to assert their spot in the pecking order, and flapping their wings before crowing to spread the testosterone in their body, etc. But what is especially interesting about Nyup crowing is, like mentioned before, she used to be lowest on the pecking older for so long, and also because she wasn’t our only hen to do it.

Hei Hei, our oldest hen, and by far our most dominant hen since I started keeping chickens (I’ll have a post about her later), also crows. She was actually the first hen in the flock to do it, but she only crowed in the morning, around the time the other roosters in the neighborhood started crowing. I think it’s important to mention that for most of both these hens’ lives, there was a rooster in the flock. First there was Cluck Norris (who’s memorialized as the animated white rooster gif on my site), who gave his life valiantly in protection of our flock against a coyote, and then there was Rooster (named after the Top Gun movie’s Rooster) who was rehomed after he outgrew some of smallest girls, and then there was a young, feral rooster that came by on occasion noticing that the girls were rooster-less who eventually gave up after several visits.

It must have been a few months that went by with no rooster when Hei Hei finally decided she would take on the rooster role. This was likely further triggered by the addition of two more pullets (young hens that are yet to produce eggs) to the flock, the first time hens were introduced without a rooster. Usually a rooster would chase new hens around a bit, and do some drag-wing courtship dances to assert dominance, but this time there was no rooster around. Other ways chickens show dominance is dropping their shoulder/wing, doing some pecking on another chicken’s head, or sometimes even clawing an offending hen with their toes. But I guess these usuals weren’t enough, so Hei Hei decided to crow, and continue to do so. It was pretty cool.

Nyup started crowing shortly after she did, maybe a couple days after, but specifically only in the late afternoons. It was almost like they were doing shift-changes. Hei Hei crows at sunrise, Nyup crows at dusk. An interesting bit of co-flock leading.

Chicken pecking order is really complicated. Generally you can tell which is the most dominant hen from the get-go, with some various telltale signs (other hens usually follow their lead). You can also generally tell who is the lowest on the pecking order (the one gives way for food the most, the one who is picked on most often, etc.). But it starts getting complicated in the middle. You’ll have hen A running away from hen B, but hen B is picked on more often by the more dominant hens. It’s just… tangled. But all the hens in the flock seems to understand what the pecking order is innately.

Nyup was usually the lower-end of the pecking order (she would run away most often even if a hen wasn’t actively going for her), but you can tell she wanted to be a more dominant hen all her life. She would try to stand up to the more dominant hens and then almost immediately give way (like she was testing the waters– “I’m stronger than you! Haha, wait, I was just kidding”). With every new addition to the flock, however, is an upset to the pecking order and a new hierarchy needs to be established. With the two new pullets Nyup saw an opportunity, and started crowing, and Hei Hei, our dominant, chill hen, was cool with it. What’s further interesting though is that though Nyup crows like Hei Hei, Nyup is arguably still squarely in the middle of the pecking order. Hen Griffey Jr. and Princess Lay-a (we’ll have a post on them later, too), is higher on the pecking order than Nyup still, but both don’t crow. Chickens are so interesting!

Anyway, if you enjoyed this bit of Nyup fun facts and read this far, here are a few more pictures of Nyup growing up. Enjoy!:

Nyup was always cute.

She also always had a bit of an attitude:

But her cuteness would manifest into becoming our prettiest hen in the flock:

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed Nyup’s story. =)