Playing Chicken

You are never alone with a chicken,

 

By popular request a little more about our chucks, we have, in all the time we have lived here kept chickens.

When we moved in there was one already installed in the barn, it must have been left behind by the out going owners (a messy divorce, there wasn’t much going on in the communication department, between the two parties) we were offered their two goats and a flock of geese,as part of the house deal, but we declined, (there may well still be, an ongoing a goat, geese custody/maintenance battle, being played out in a court somewhere for all we know)  thinking we had enough work on our hands in buying the house, looking after livestock, wasn’t on our agenda.

A couple of days after we moved in, my Dad found a hen sat in a a seed tray, on a ledge in a dark corner of the barn teetering precariously,  on top of a large pile off eggs, she had made this secluded corner her home, undiscovered  by the fox, she just kept laying an egg each day, and foraged for food in the garden and field. We carefully removed the pile of eggs, some were very old! and the next day she laid us our first free range fresh egg, the rest is history, we were now keepers of chucks.

We usually keep about six at any one time, they are free range (and that includes the kitchen if they get chance) just very occasionally we forget to shut the hen house up at night and a fox will kill some or all of them (foxes must check the hen house each night) this is a bad hen keeping moment, you feel you have let them down, but we try and salve our consciences by reasoning that a good, short life is better than being a battery hen. 

We are most definitely softie hen keepers, rarely  have any had to be dispatched, and that is usually on welfare grounds, if they become sick; all you want to know about killing a chicken can be found here on Stoneheads blog although there are some alternatives available, as Hedgewizard explained to Stonehead

‘Thanks Stoney, really appreciated. I think I’ll invest in one of those hand dispatchers, as I really didn’t fancy risking buggering things up doing it by hand. I did have a friend who used to kill his with a golf club, and impressively painless it was too. The only bit I didn’t like was having to retrieve the head from the garden over the road before the owners found it…’

 

But back to our ‘girls’, our two warrens, ‘thing one’ and ‘thing two’ (and the ring leaders) are old now,

 

about three years old, they have been laying until very recently, but not each day and the shells are thin. Recent additions are to are flock are two Daisybelles, which are very pretty, (the photo at the top of the post) and the two white ‘leghorns’  they have a  delightful ‘comb overs’

So introductions over, I tell you more about them another day, they have many adventures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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