You know how chickens clean themselves?  With dirt.  I didn’t know that until I started doing chicken-keeping research.  Yup, they dirt bathe.  As strange as it sounds, it’s actually one of the cutest activities I’ve seen them enjoy.

They create little dirt pits in different places all over the backyard by scratching up the dirt to loosen it, and then rolling around in it.  They make sure to get specks of dirt in between every feather and in all the little crevices.  And they purely delight in this completely filthy act.  Sweet Sarai even purrs when she’s wriggling around in the scratched-up earth.  It’s adorable.

Typically, I sort of enjoy discovering where they’ve dug up the ground.  But today I found them delighting in their favorite pastime inside my chicken herb garden.  Yes, it does happen to be located at the border of their run, but they’ve always disregarded it and my plants have flourished.  I was annoyed at first, but I got over it quickly when I saw how cute they were.  I mean chickens bathing in my herb garden?  Sure, why not.