bish blog

We’ve got feathers now, and an intimidating stare…! Still not sure (haven’t looked) if we’re a boy chook or a girl chook, and unsure what the future holds if we decide to grow some.

Little chook is a month old now, and has survived being left to its own devices. No special treatment, no special food. For the first couple of weeks she and her foster mother (a Welsummer, not the White Sussex in the background) stayed outside on straw beneath the coop. Eventually, the chick managed to climb, leap, wobble, collapse up the ladder into the coop and it’s been overnighting in there with the rest of the girls ever since.

By chance, Miss found out that the local farm shop had some ‘Point of Lay’ chickens for sale and we picked up three new girls on Saturday. We now have two Marans – our original Speckledy from 2005 and a new Basic Marans, the two Welsummers from 2007 and two new White Sussex.

The picture is taken from my study, and no doubt we’ll get better ones once the new chooks are a tad less nervous. They’re getting one hell of a sorting out from the established crew – the phrase “pecking order” has very real and painful meaning behind it! Eventually they’ll either sort out their differences and get along or we’ll be burying the loser(s). Nature, red in beak and claw…

The naming of chickens is apparently mandatory (!) and a friend has suggested “tikka”, “vindaloo” and “madras”… The resemblance to our original chickens though means we will probably be recycling their names So welcome Spike-let, Scarlet-let-let and Clara-too, otherwise known as “the Sequel Chooks!”

Oh, and we’re still running the egg spreadsheet… Since we started we’ve had 2535 eggs at a total per egg cost including housing, chooks and feed of 54p each! [grin] Call it £3 per half dozen – you’d be mad not to.

It’s becoming a problem… not a big problem, but a problem. The local wild birds are eating the chicken feed faster than the chickens. I don’t honestly mind; after all we have seed feeders all over the back garden and it would seem daft to worry about a handful of layers pellets getting devoured in the front. I wonder, though, when the girls will work out why they have no food. Perhaps I can persuade the Starlings and Blackbirds to lay some eggs in return…

I’m a very naughty boy.

Promise I won’t buy anything at Priddy Folk Festival this weekend. It’s an NS WAV electric double bass in Amber Sunburst and it’s… well it’s rather lovely.

Plugged into the Line 6 Low Down it sounds pretty double bass-like, although I have to keep it down a bit or the rest of the house goes into sympathetic resonance!

Finally the larger raised beds in the back garden are finished. It’s taken some time in a life currently far too short of free time but last evening I put the last dowel in the edging blocks and leveled the soil. The rest, as the saying goes, is up to Miss.

The bits you can see planted are of course the original beds which Miss found to be so miserly. The new ones come out nearly three metres and more than double the growing space available for shrubs and flowers. The next project in the back garden is to widen the path around the house and edge it grass-side with more wooden blocks.

I’m home today having worked through the night. Unable to actually sleep (I’ll catch up over the bank holiday weekend) I’m logged in here and at work pretending to multi-task (ha! Like that’ll ever work!). As I sat here working through work emails I saw a springer spaniel whizz past the window heading straight for the chicken run. With spring only just upon us it’s a bit of a battleground there at present, not much grass and the remaining leaves on the slowly establishing beech hedge are golden and falling away in favour of new growth.

Round and round the run the ragged rover ran and stop him I could not. Frantic chickens everywhere (well, only three currently but that’s still a lot of flapping believe me!) chucking themselves at the fence on the one side as the maddened mutt threw himself at the fence from the other! Finally an owner appeared and after a few minutes reclaimed the dog. ‘Sorry, he’s a house pet who got out.’ Um. Springer spaniels are not house pets, they’re gun dogs bred for speed and stamina. No wonder it went for it’s freedom. Still, nothing damaged eh.

After the crisis subsided I went in to gather the eggs and calm the girls. Two eggs… and two chickens! Not three. Um. Recalling the fun and games we had when we first got the Welsommers (read back gentle reader) I wasn’t looking forward to tracking and catching our missing presumed uneaten gal. I locked the other two in and left the door to the run open. After an hour I went out again and she’d come back! Ace! We have homing chickens! LOL

Blessings of the equinox to one and all, and (fair trade) chocolate loveliness to them as want it.

We had our first egg of 2008ce today! The last one of 2007ce was 16th November, so the girls have been freeloading all over winter. I was wondering if they’d all gone broody, or just plain idle. The mite infection on Esme’s leg seems to be clearing up and, assuming it clears up for good, we’ll probably get four more ‘Point of Lay’ Speckledys in late Spring.

A friend recently asked me how the chickens had done over winter, and particularly what state the grass was in? Grass of course tends to go dormant during the colder months and doesn’t grow back if heavily scratched and pecked at by inquisitive chooks. His reason for asking was that his family were considering taking on some rescued battery hens, but that he would let them roam free on his lawn during the day. Heh. Grins.

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…

The mite infestation that lead to the unfortunate but kinder euthanasia of one of the Welsummers has passed on to Esme, our Speckledy. She’s one of the original girls and the friendliest chicken in town, and I’d be sad to lose her. So, late last night by the light of the full moon (and a torch!) we were out there washing all the birds legs, and slathering masses of Vaseline on them. I often wonder what other folk do with themselves of an evening…

What a strange day! This morning we found one of the chickens with a badly infected foot – probably the result of a previous mite attack gone bad. I decided she was not going to recover, which meant I had to provide the assistance into her next cycle. 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 my 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.

Later, Miss and I went for a walk around the village and came upon the stink of diesel where it oughtn’t be. On investigation we found diesel oil floating on top of a swiftly flowing drainage stream. The speed of the stream, after the recent rain and floods, did not prevent the oil slick from covering the whole surface in a rainbow scum, which showed the rate at which it was leaking into the ditch (seemingly coming up from under the ditch itself possibly following the water table). It doesn’t actually take a lot of oil to make a huge slick, but then it doesn’t take much oil to kill all the life in a normally healthy stream either. There was evidence of scorching on much of the vegetation, caused by the oil, all up either side of the ditch. I called the local council environmental department and the Environment Agency, and this afternoon we placed booms across the stream to stop the oil getting into the local river. Hopefully the cause of the contamination will soon be located and isolated. I was impressed at the speed at which the council Environmental Officer attended site, and at the cooperation from the adjacent businesses. Possibly I am slightly hyper about such incidents, working as I do in an industry with thousands of gallons of oil (all, usually, very well under control and safely bunded), but I’m pleased what could have been a long term leak has been identified and controlled.