bish blog

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…

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…

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.

DOCUMENTARY: Hugh’s Chicken Run
On: Channel 4 (4)
Date: Monday 7th January 2008
Time: 21:00 to 22:00 (1 hour long)

An anytime alert is set for 15 minutes before the programme starts
Hugh’s Chicken Run launches the The Big Food Fight, a season of programming which aims to raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating. Running over three consecutive nights, Hugh’s Chicken Run presents Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall with his biggest challenge yet, as he goes behind the chicken shed doors to change the way Britain consumes chicken.
(Watch Online, Subtitles, Part 1 of 3)

Scroll down to find the noisy link!
Unless you are using Internet Explorer, in which case you’re already hitting mute!

(ok, I couldn’t take the flippin’ sound effects myself! I’ve muted them…)

Just brought half a dozen eggs in amongst the weekly shop, since our five girls have stopped laying for the winter. The thought occurs to me, how come there are so many boxes of local ‘free range’ eggs available? Since my ladies are not laying, due to the season, the lack of sunlight and the cold, where do all the other ‘free range’ eggs come from?