Tag Archives: chickens

Sealing the deal, the old-fashioned way (YUK!)

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I bought a galvanised hen drinker from a dear old Wiltshire man a couple of days ago.  He’d found a stash of them in the back of his dreadful old shed, and thought he’d make an honest penny by flogging them.  I needed a new one ever since Tallboy (enormous, ancient polo pony) trod on ours by mistake.  I’ll never know what a very large horse was doing in the hen run, and he was so old and sweet that I didn’t make an issue of it.  But from then on the hens have refreshed themselves out of a saucepan, which gives the hen run that ‘tinkers backyard’ look.

So when I saw an advert on a dog-eared postcard in the Post Office which said “Hen Drinkers ten quid”, written in wobbly pencil, the moment seemed right to restock.  I knew the address, one of those cottages which look very picturesque from the outside as long as you don’t have to go inside.  All thatch, and tiny windows, and rising damp.  He came shambling out, and we went and admired his line of hen drinkers and they were very nice.  In fact mine seems new.  Somebody in his family at some stage obviously had an obsessive hen drinker habit, and just couldn’t go past a farming shop without laying another one in.

So all was fine and dandy.  I produced a ten pound note and picked up the hen drinker and – here is the point of this blog, stick with me – he spat copiously on his hand and offered it to shake. Yuuuuuuuuuk!!!  Complete, utter gross-out!!!

What on earth do you do?  What would YOU do?  Here is this sweet elderly chap with his hen drinkers, pleased at a sale and wanting to seal the deal in the traditional way.  And there was his leathery palm covered in spit being shoved in my direction.

Well I’ll tell you what I did.  I shut my eyes and shook on it.  Our hands met with a squelch, and I walked away with a happy smile while he waved at me over his picturesquely rotting fence.  Then the second I was out of his sight, I wiped my hand on grass until it nearly came off.  Then I rushed home and soaked it in Dettol.

And the funny thing is that while I was walking away, my hand covered in slime, I was thinking:  “well at least I can write about this in my blog!”  Sure enough, it’s been very therapeutic, so thank you for that.  And the hens just love their new drinker.  So on that positive and wholesome note:  HAPPY EASTER!!!

Impulses

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Different people obey different impulses.  Some shop for shoes (“yes, I’ve got another 50 pairs, but those jade crystal embellished suede spike heeled Jimmy Choos are just so darling … “), some give up boring executive type jobs and decide to build a future career repairing dry-stone walls (this is true: I once did a dry-stone walling course with three of them.  Scary.).  My particular impulse is to fire up our little yellow incubator and put some more eggs in it.  Even if I have poultry coming out of my ears and the last thing I need is more of the little angels.

I don’t even take a straw poll of what comes running when I enter the orchard with a container of corn.  That would be almost sensible, along the lines of:  well, we have enough peacocks (one, more than enough), enough egg laying bantams (I’m running out of egg rich recipes in which to use their largesse and am giving most of their eggs away at the moment), enough non-productive but charming bantams (ie anything that seems to be covered in a mesh of frills instead of feathers) and absolutely no guinea-fowl.

The sad demise of Precious, the guinea fowl, comes in a blog a couple of months back.  I miss her loud African chanting from the top of her favourite apple tree, her hunch backed earnestness as she scampered around the orchard on little fat feet, and her blissfully spotted feathers.  So it would seem sensible, if I have a compulsion to start up the incubator again, to obtain a clutch of guinea-fowl eggs (triangular, spotted, hard as granite) and start to repopulate.

Or how about some quail?  Bonkers, to a man, but the eggs are beautiful and presented in a little plaited straw nest would make a lovely hostess present at supper parties, saving us a fortune in bottles of wine and boxes of chocolates.  Or ducks.  We have no ducks at the moment, and the slugs and snails are rejoicing and partying all night in the flower bed as a result.  Ducks would be great, either Indian Runner (they have a habit of forming into single file, leaning slightly into the wind and patrolling around the garden that I could watch for ever) or call ducks (small, cute and never shut up).

Nah.  I’ve got a friend coming to coffee any moment now bearing has some bantam eggs she found knocking around her hen run that she thought would be pretty.  Probably.  If they are fertile, which they may not be.  She only has 3, so I am padding out the incubator with 9 of our own.  Which means that in 19 days time we will have yet more mixed-race bantams to bring up and release into the hen run to find their place.  And quite honestly (this is the impulse bit) I cannot wait!!

To brood or not to brood?

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Hens have taken over this blog for the moment.  I like to give you breaking news and at this very moment the sheep are just being sheep, the horses are minding their own businesses and eating hay, the dogs and cat and rolling along in neutral and so it goes on.  But the hens are Making Themselves Felt, so I write about them.  Today, for instance, we have three broody hens stacking in the nest box.  And the problem here is that they are the three least suitable hens from the flock to become lovely young mothers.  It’s still cold, could get colder, and chicks needs nurturing.  In the nest box, reading from the bottom we have:  Jill, who becomes a dormant cushion when broody but doesn’t wake up to look after the chicks.  She would happily watch them straggle out into the cold and catch pneumonia while she continued to snuggle deeper into her nest.  Jill needs high summer to successfully rear chicks.  Next up is Daphne, who believes in tough love.  When I let her brood eggs last year all went swimmingly until the chicks hatched out, whereupon Daphne got up and strode briskly away leaving a nestful of cheeping chicks which I eventually had to rescue and bring up indoors under a heat lamp.  Cheers, Daphne!  And topping the pile of growling broodies, each of which is trying to nick the eggs from the others, is Beatrice who is completely hysterical.  Things that don’t worry the others much, such as tea being served slightly late or somebody looking at her, make Beatrice rush about squawking and shedding feathers.  She would be an awful role model for any chick she managed to rear beyond its first day.  So keen though they are to sit on eggs, and cosy as it is in the mound of feathers that is the nest box today, I’m going to wait for Fluffy to become broody for this year’s young entry.  Fluffy is great, she sits well, loves her chicks and then when they are about eight weeks old, bought their first flat, got their first job, she ignores them completely and goes back to being a laying hen again.  So the job’s hers when she feels like it, not that I know yet whether the eggs are fertile – whether there will be anybody actually in there when Fluffy’s done her stuff (see last Thursday’s blog).

Herding Hens is Hard

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I’ve just let the flock out of their hen run, and this is something I don’t do without careful thought.  I was out all day yesterday, so left them in their hen run and they gave me to understand this morning that they were bored witless (which is quite something, for a hen) and could promise no further eggs unless I gave them a bit of freedom today.  I know they love a day out but there are three things that make me think long and hard before I open that gate.  The first is the sly nests.  When in their run, the hens lay in their nice clean straw-lined nest box.  Easy.  When they are out, they either lay in plain view in the mud or find a little nook underneath a trailer, or inside a hay bale, or somewhere I will never find it, and lay there.  So I either get muddy eggs or none at all.  To make it more annoying, the dogs know exactly where the sly nests are and spend a happy day wagging around the garden with their mouths full of eggs.  The second reason for caution is that the hens enjoy a good rummage in the only remaining flower bed.  When I ask them politely to stop, they look at me down their beaks and go back and have another good rummage.  And it doesn’t do the bed any good at all.  But the final reason that I let them out against my better judgement is that they are truly awful to get back in the run again.  My geese have the souls of chain saw murderers but are no problem to herd at all.  They form up in a line every evening and go wobbling into their house.  Herding hens is like juggling ping pong balls in a hurricane.  Every hen wants to go a different way at a different speed, and the cockerel Wenceslas (though on my side)  is no help at all because his feathers come down over his eyes in moments of stress and he doesn’t know where he is.  And Precious the guinea fowl is wild and free anyway, and tempts the flock to rebel.  So there I am in the gathering twilight, with the good girls safely back in their ark, the bad girls rushing about squawking with Precious yelling encouragement from the sidelines, and Wenceslas blundering about in the middle of them wondering why life isn’t as straightforward as it was yesterday.  Which is why, as soon as I had opened the gate and watched them streaming happily through it and fanning out into the garden, I really really wished that I hadn’t done it.

Wenceslas, an unusual cockerel

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Our cockerel, Wenceslas, is a Polish Frizzle.  Think of an old fashioned feather duster being held in a wind tunnel and there you have a good mental image of Wenceslas.  When he first came to live with us his top knot came right down in front of his eyes, like a very low umbrella.  I had to trim the front so that he could see out, and stop bumping into things (apple trees, sheep’s legs etc) and spending his days in nervous hysteria.  Now he is mature his topknot grows up and out, and he looks more like a pineapple but at least he can see where he’s going.  We’ve had many cockerels in our time, some of which left a greater impression than others (Genghis Khan the ruthless attack-cockerel and George the perfect gentleman Brahma for instance) but Wenceslas is something else.  For a start he crows the first half of the theme tune of ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ instead of the more normal ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo.  Secondly he has a deep and unrequited passion for Precious the guinea fowl, while more or less ignoring his hens.  He trundles around after her crooning love songs and making lewd suggestions which Precious completely ignores.  She lives to sing, and can’t be having with a social life.  Thirdly, and uniquely for a cockerel in my experience, he is completely selfish.  Most cockerels, on finding something rich and rare like a beetle or half a worm, make an enormous commotion and bow and posture, and call the hens to show them the glories of what they have discovered.  And the hens eat it and then thank the cockerel in the traditional fashion.  But if Wenceslas finds something nice, he eats it.  Quietly.  I wonder whether we’ll have chicks in the Spring?  It will be interesting to find out whether the hens rock his quirky style or whether they decide en masse to do the other thing.

Hens versus chickens

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Somebody asked me the other day what was the difference between ‘hens’ and ‘chickens’.  And I’ve been pondering this (between getting Book ready for publication – I’m up to July – mopping up the mega leak and acting as butler/housekeeper/scullery maid to the animals).  ‘Chickens’, to me, sound like the huddled masses.  People talk about battery chickens more than battery hens.  ‘Hens’ seem to have a touch more dignity.  Occasionally I come by a pedigree hen, something with white ear patches, or frilly knickers, or a wild topknot.  And I wouldn’t call one of those a chicken, or at least not in her hearing.  Most of my hens are bantams, anyway, and different rules apply.  Bantams don’t do batteries: they don’t have any truck with year-round laying, or living in little wire cages.  And anyway, their eggs are too small (or in the winter, not at all).  So if they were anything, they would be hens.  My grandmother called the whole lot ‘fowl’, which seems to have gone out of fashion.  Then there is ‘poultry’, which is a touch municipal, suggestive of a large commercial flock.  And yet if I were to describe what comes running towards me whenever I appear outdoors with a bucket, it would have to be ‘poultry’ to include the hens/bantams, Precious the guinea fowl and McDuff.  As a completely digression, may I introduce McDuff?  He currently stars on my profile page for Twitter, for those who twit.  He’s more than a peachick and isn’t quite a full peacock.  A peanager?  If he were human he’d be wearing a hoodie, chucking half bricks through windows and being well dodgy.  As he’s a peanager, he chases the dogs, pecks gardening humans and when he can he nips indoors, jumps on the kitchen table and pulls apart any attempt I’ve made at flowers on the table.  Back to the subject:  I think I’ll stick with ‘hen’s for full size and ‘bantams’ for sawn-off.  It works for me.

Teenage rebellion.

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Every evening the hens trundle sedately into their hen house while Precious, our only guinea fowl, ascends to the very top of an apple tree and yells loud African slogans into the night sky.  This can go on for hours – it’s an echoing, repetitive call which we’re all rather fond of, though it’s just as well we don’t have any near neighbours.  Meanwhile last year’s hen chicks have just come into lay and are feeling hormonal and demanding.  Last night I went to shut up the hens, found the hen house half empty and finally located the bright young things swaying in the branches of Precious’ apple tree, nearly (but not quite) as high up as she was.  They were gazing down at me with a mixture of defiance and alarm and obviously had no intention of coming to bed with everyone else.  I can’t leave them out – Precious is entirely street wise but if the pullets fluttered down in the night a fox would probably have them.  Also the Frizzles aren’t really weatherproof.  So I had to climb up the apple tree, retrieve them (while they shrieked at the top of their voices that I was, like, totally unfair and minging) and put them back in the hen house.  And I also had to clip their wings to prevent it becoming a habit, and I don’t think that any of them will ever talk to me again.  Like, ever.

Hens hating weather (and blaming me)

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To say that my hens were underwhelmed by yesterday’s weather would be putting it mildly.  They HATED it.  Firstly the wind blew their feathers inside out.  This was bad enough for an ordinary hen, but the Frizzles come factory-fitted with naturally inside-out feathers and the wind made them look as if they’d all stuck their beaks into an electric socket.  Secondly the rain drenched down and turned the hen run to MUD, which squeezes up between a hen’s toes and makes them walk funny.  Most of them have turned off egg production for the winter and are waiting until a perfect day next Spring when they may, just may, feel like it again.  But Jill has been steadily laying eggs every day.  Until yesterday, when she looked me right in the eye and said OK!  FINE!! If you’re going to arrange weather like this you can suffer the consequences.  No more eggs!  Zippo!!  Basically she couldn’t have made it more clear that if I want any more of her beautiful brown eggs, I can whistle for them.  Then the flock just hung around underneath a patch of dead nettles and glared at me.  They didn’t need to do this, they have a warm dry hen house, but the patch of dead nettles looked more dramatic.  The hens on the outside of the damp gaggle constantly pecked their way into the inside of the group for added protection – the effect was something like the Emperor Penguins of the Antarctic, but without the scenery, the air of ‘chaps pulling together to make the best out of a tricky situation’ that shines out of the TV screen, and indeed without David Attenborough.  Just a cross bunch of wet hens getting slowly wetter.  I did my best for them, mixed them a lovely hot mash with added vegetable peel (which they bolted down but in the manner of Oliver Twist’s workhouse) and suggested that they might prefer to watch the rain from the comfort of their commodious roofed patio.  But it was no good.  The weather was dire, they were determined to be miserable and it was All My Fault.

Wet hens

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Phrase of the day:  ‘as mad as a wet hen’.  Wenceslas, the cockerel, has been sleeping al fresco for some time.  He likes to feel the gentle breeze in his feathers and escape the nagging in the hen house.  Some time ago C built a perch in the hen run for the peacock, and though the peacock is long gone his perch remains and it suits Wenceslas nicely.  After a while, Precious the guinea fowl, joined him out there.  She likes to look at the stars with Wenceslas and tell him stories about her native Africa.  Then his two teenage daughters, who are going through a rebellious stage, decided to come too and there would be a line of the four of them in the morning sneering at the stick-in-the-muds who slept in the henhouse, and saying how much healthier they felt sleeping outdoors, at one with nature.  Last night, inspired by the Indian Summer, Fluffy decided to join them.  Fluffy, a pretty little hen who is nearly (but not quite) a Light Sussex, thought she would sit on the peacock perch with Wenceslas, Precious and the girls and look at the stars too.  Only it rained during the night, and this morning all five of them are soaking.  Precious has tight feathers and has shrugged it off.  Wenceslas looks ridiculous with a soaked feathery pom-pom on his head, but he has risen above it.  The girls’ fascinators are spiky with wet, which rather matches their current angry style.  But Fluffy is livid!  She is bedraggled, no better word for it, she couldn’t see the stars and it was all completely awful.  Now she is not talking to Wenceslas, and chased the girls away from breakfast this morning (didn’t dare try it with Precious, who has a peck like the hammer of Thor).  Fluffy is a wet hen, and she just couldn’t be madder.

Hens

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Many of my hens live to a great age and attain a certain ‘you can’t touch me I’m a very old hen’ attitude.  This means that they will lay an egg once a month (but only if they feel like it), will deliberately walk up to and peck any dog innocently asleep on the lawn, and will only take their dust baths in the middle of my one remaining flower bed.  Cockerels, however, live life at a faster pace and don’t tend to be with us for so long.  But my goodness they leave their mark behind them.  Raffles, for example, had tight feathers, long legs and enormous orange eyes and left behind him a generation who were as mad a bucket of frogs, the sort of hen who would rush about screaming and shedding feathers if a slug ventured into the hen run.  After Raffles came Rocky, who combined great placidity with a pair of magnificent feathery trousers.  Rocky’s children all had trousers too, and if they found a slug they ate it.  Other cockerels came and went, leaving behind offspring who might lay blue eggs perhaps, or only come in pastel shades.  Our penultimate cockerel was a Mottled Pekin called Snork.  All Snork’s chicks were born spotted as a domino and so circular in shape that you couldn’t tell front from back until they started walking.  I mourned Snork sincerely when he died, he was a sweet character and (unique among his kind) never attacked anything.  Here I should give a dishonourable mention to Jack the Ripper, a cockerel so violent that I had to pay danger money to anybody who agreed to hen sit when we were away on holiday.  Recently I was given our current cockerel Wenceslas, a Polish Frizzle.  Frizzles appear to have been stuck backwards in a wind tunnel, every feather blown inside-out, and to add to Wenceslas’ visual impact he has a magnificent pom-pom hairdo.  His first chicks are now teenagers and came with outrageous feathery fascinators ‘factory fitted’.  I’ve called them Beatrice and Eugenie.  His second batch of chicks are promising well, and every one of them has a beehive or punk or mullet hairdo.  This time round, thanks to Wenceslas, we are going for Big Hair.