Billina
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Billina is a hen tossed overboard in a storm with Dorothy Gale in the novel Ozma of Oz, the third Oz book, and a sequel to L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. She is Dorothy's animal companion for this adventure, the role that Toto the dog serves in the first book.
A spunky, talkative chicken, Billina was originally named Bill because, she tells Dorothy, "no one could tell whether I was going to be a hen or a rooster." Dorothy insists on changing the hen's name to a feminine form. Billina endures several scares with the Kansas farmgirl before they defeat the Nome King as only a hen can. At the end of the novel, Billina settles in the Emerald City.
Later books reveal that Billina has hatched many chicks (their father unknown). She names all of them Dorothy after her young friend. Gender confusion reappears, however, and the proud mother discovers that some of those chicks will be "horrid roosters"; she changes the males' names to Daniel.
One of Baum's earliest books described raising Hamburg chickens, and he drew on that expertise in depicting Billina.
