One of our Welsummers went broody a while ago. For a time we just kept moving her out of the coop into the run, hoping she’d forget the idea, but she insisted on returning and laying, superbly hot and shaped like a deflated football shaped non-flying saucer. In the end one of my parish council colleagues Toby, who is helping with the burial ground, gave me three fertilised – or possibly fertilised – eggs at the start of July, and we pushed them underneath…

This morning, when I went for the eggs, I found a surprise!

The ‘mum’ appears happy with her new responsibility, shielding it from the other girls – and from me! The chick is eating mash and crushed weetabix, and taking from the water drinker. Time will tell if it survives the heat, the other girls and the predators (no foxes (I think the Berkeley hunt took every one just before the ban) but sparrowhawks, magpies etc). There are two other eggs in the coop, now currently abandoned but presumably soon to be sat on again. I wonder, though, if this chook chick will make it back up the ladder into the coop tonight… guess I have a duty to perform as foster-father…

Her body temperature is almost feverish! I understand that broodiness is brought on by a rise in body temperature, but I’m too soft to resort to suggested dowses in buckets of water. The Welsummers are generally the hardest to handle, fast and flighty (heh, recall these were the girls that we chased all over the village), but this one is too focused on being a warm blanket to care now; all she does is give a gentle whine of irritation when I lift her.

So, for now we’ve gone from five eggs a day from the six girls to four. Still more than we can comfortably get through, so we’re being generous where we can as well as baking lots of cakes! Time will tell if she gets the message or if she becomes another pet, like Esme our half blind but friendly Maran – one of the originals from 2005. Well if we’re already feeding the local starling population…

Grass? What grass?

As you see, not a lot of grass left. Chickens are brighter than you might think, and love to explore their environment. By nature they also scratch for their food, even when presented with a brimming feeder. Thus by spring the ground is a little tired, excavated and muddy!

The four girls that are currently living here have approximately 35m2 of free ranging space to play with. That’s a little more than a battery hen is used to. Battery hens can be squashed as many as seventeen to the square metre meaning I could, conceivably (if I was a complete bastard), get nearly six hundred birds into this run… Boggling, isn’t it? I don’t think the grass would have much of a chance then, even in high summer (and it certainly would be high, with that number of chickens!).

Oh, the stalks are what is left of sprouts once the girls have had their way with them! Some of our sprouts opened on the stalk before we got around to picking them this year, so we donated them. Very fond of sprouts, are chickens…

These three are flighty girls, unlike our almost pet chickens. Ignoring the normal conviention of clipping the wings we let them out in the back garden, and spent the next two days getting them back. Remember folks… clip them feathers! LOL

We don’t clip after the first time. By the time the feathers grow back, the girls know where they live.

{update to the update – it ought to be noted that the mite infection spread to all three remaining chickens but the constant daily slathering of vaseline over their legs, and especially over the area where the scales had lifted, eventually cleared the infestation. We’ve subsequently had this reoccur, again in the damp winter months, and the Vaseline treatment has completely cleared it.}

Only the second girl I’ve had to send on, and the first I stunned with a bit of two by two…

Having been … er, inspired by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall recently, I bit my lip and wrung her neck. Not a pleasant task, even knowing how chickens flap about after death. What I wasn’t expecting – though perhaps given druid tendencies I ought to have been – was the jolt of electricity I felt as her life ended; as if her life force was a shorted, discharging battery! The pulse ran through my hand and up my arm; slightly weaker than mains electricity but not dissimilar in nature.

Was is my own nervous system under stress, or what?I have the idea we may raise meat birds before long, so perhaps this unpleasant task will become more regular (although, hopefully, never routine), but as a possibly diseased and somewhat aged bird she found a new home under the trees with the other chooks and guinea pigs of times past.

May 2005 – April 2006

April gave us 89 eggs, so the total number of eggs for the year was:
901

The rush to lay four a day, alluded to last month, didn’t materialise. Indeed, a few more eggs than normal were found broken and some were clearly eaten. We think it’s Spike. She’s beginning to show signs of not coping on her one good leg, and perhaps she’s eating the eggs in the coop that is becoming too hard to get out of. It’s something we’ve been expecting, while at the same time hoping it won’t happen. I think, in order to be fair to her and us, Spike is going to leave us before much longer.

On happier grounds, the vegetable plots are doing well. Toward the end of the month I planted out the runner and French beans, while the white, spring and red onions, garlic, beetroot, radish and parsnip all look to be doing well. I put some brocolli out form the greenhouse, and popped in some potatoes too. The strawberries are beginning to flower, and the lettuce and salad leaves are in good leaf.

So, all in all the first year has gone well. We spent too much money on the original chicken run, which now remains immobile. We ought really to have bought an old shed instead. However, the automatic coop door opener is a real boon, worth every penny. We’ve not bought an egg from the shops since we started and, although it’s sometimes been difficult, we’ve never had trouble with finding folk to chicken-sit while we go away on holiday or to festivals. Apart from Spike, we’ve had no medical incidents, no infections and no foxes. Bird ‘flu has remained an imminent but unfulfilled theat, and folk still stop as they walk past in the park to view the birds, especially if they’ve got children with them. More than anything, we’ve had, and continue to have, a great deal of fun with our girls. They rush to the fence to see us when we open the front door, and when we drive home in our cars, hoping against hope for some kitchen scraps. Which we love giving them.

So, cost per egg then. Nearly got away with that one. Would you pay £1.20 for your egg? We do.   
 
I’ll probably not keep up a month by month chicken diary here on in, unless of course you lot email me telling me I simply must keep writing those wonderfully witty monologues …
 

Happy Daze! Almost as Spring brought her warm rains and bursting green buds, daffodils and winds to the land, the girls got their daily rhythm back. The last four days we’ve had four eggs waiting for us when we got home. Already, we are getting to that wonderful time when we have too many eggs and can give some away, sharing the bounty. Remembering that we started this on Mayday last year, we 
are now (April) in our last month of our first year. We haven’t managed to hit the thousand egg target (which wasn’t ever really a target; we’re not in it for max produce but for the love of it), even if the girls do an egg a day each all April. In March we were given eighty-one eggs (a massive improvement on February’s 35), and that took us to the eleven month total of 812 eggs.

Apart from the chickens and the eggs (it was a draw…) we are moving on with the veggie plots and flower beds. The greenhouse (which is actually green!) is filling up with seedlings, while the vegetable plots are already drilled up with lettuces, radishes, spring white and red onions, strawberries, beetroots, parsnips and spuds. Beans and peas are on their way, as are the tomatoes in growbags to the right of view in the adjacent picture.

Maybe we’re not living ‘The Good Life’ yet, but anything’s possible!

As for the girls, they still love the life they live. And long may they do so, Avian Flu is getting closer by the day (is currently in France and Germany) and we watch the DEFRA pages intently. I think we’re stuck with the Flu; it will remain endemic in our wild birds for years, but there’s no good reason not to vaccinate domestic birds. I guess we have to consider putting the girls back into the 6′x6′ covered run soon, or covering the whole 70sq.m. enclosure… I don’t know if that needs planning permission.

Hey ho. We received 35 eggs, the lowest number of any month even taking into account the short month. But every one was lovely! That makes 731 over ten months.

One of the ‘hardships’ of chicken keeping in the winter time is going out in the freezing cold at dawn and dusk opening and shutting the door to the coop. No more. I’ve just invested (read: wasted) a small fortune in an automatic door mechanism that works by detecting light levels. You didn’t want to know the price per egg any more, did you? No, thought not.