Chicken and rice.....

They love it!

One laying

It seems that one of our new girls is laying pretty regularly now, though the eggs are quite small. We've been having them for breakfast over the weekend and were amazed to find, despite the diminutive size, one of the eggs was a double yolker!

And they made a very tasty addition to breakfast! (great to have proper eggs again!).

3rd night - 3 1/2 out of 4....

Three of them found their own way to bed tonight and the fourth, at first sight of me, headed for the coop. She protested with lots of very grumpy sounding squawking and I closed the chicken wire door to the coop hoping that she'd find her own way up the ramp. When I returned half an hour later she had! Two of them seem to like sharing a nest box. 

2nd Night - 2 out of 4 not bad

Two of the chooks made it into coop before night fall all by themselves tonight......and there were no chickens in trees or other hard to reach places. A huge improvement on last night. Of the two that didn't make it 'to bed' on their own, one was hidden under a large feral tomato plant, singing softly and the other was tucked away in the corner of the chicken run. Both were very easy to pick up (having 'shut down' for the night). I popped them half way up the ramp into the coop and pushed them on their bums until they eventually went through the pop-hole door into the coop in the hope that they might remember that they're supposed to do this tomorrow........

Surprise!

Given it was their first night in their new coop and they are only 17 weeks old, we were VERY surprised to find this in the coop this morning!

Our first egg from the new brood!

?!?

Where's this then?!

The new flock!

We headed off to Longdown Activity Farm today to buy four new Chooks. They travelled, rather unceremoniously, in a large cardboard box in the boot of the car and didn't look too amused when we arrived home:

They poked around for a bit and we left them to settle in. As dusk was approaching we went out to check they'd found their way to bed.........they hadn't!

I could hear some flapping and to my horror realised that two of our new brood were up in our next door  neighbour's tree!

Oh joy!

There followed some fun and games as we extracted chooks from tree, then enticed them out from UNDER the coop and suggested (shoved them!) they go into the coop for the night where they are less likely to be consumed by Not-so-fantastic Mr Fox.

We also dismantled the compost bin (green box bottom right in photo above) which they presumably used to help them up into the tree.

Hopefully they'll get the hang of it before too long!

Preparing for new flock

So this weekend we've been preparing for our new flock. This comprised tackling the jungle that had grown in the chicken run since the demise of our last lot. There was an incredible variety of things growing in there, including tomatoes, melon, mint, corn, potatoes, nettles, unidentifiable weeds and a whole host of bugs and creepy-crawlies - an entire ecosystem in fact. Having cut this back and dug it up, we then set about the coop itself with some preserver/coating.

Here's a 'before' picture:

And here's an 'after' picture:

All we need now is some chickens!

Quiet for a while

We've been a bit quiet for a while on account of the fact that in November 2011 a fox came in to the back garden early one morning and killed all four chickens. He didn't even take one away to eat, he just took their heads. It took us some time to recover from this and to beef up the security on the the chicken run which we've now done and are hoping that it's Fox proof.

Chicken Bobbing

We have recently enhanced facilities for the chickens and they seem to like it!

An undignified send off

So having found Kiev in the coop, in a condition best described as ....... dead, I determined that the appropriate course of action was to find somebody with the requisite skills and experience in the field of deceased-chicken disposal. Fortunately for me, just such a person (Mr P) had recently returned home from work. Not deterred by the fact that he was about to get into the shower, he donned a dressing-gown, grabbed a couple of carrier bags and sloped out to the chicken coop. Mindful of their delicate sensibilities, I let the two remaining chickens out into the garden to be distracted by fresh grass and plants while their erstwhile coop-mate was unceremoniously shuffled into a carrier bag and transported to the 'Bin of Death'.

Unbeknown to us all was the fact that another member of our menagerie, Mr G the cat, had left the remnants of his previous night's exploits on the lawn. This comprised half of a hapless mouse which had been severed across its waist with seeming surgical precision, leaving the back end, complete with legs, tail and insides. We were alerted to its presence when the first of the two remaining live chickens ran past at high speed with afore mentioned half-mouse dangling and swinging unceremoniously from its beak.

Mr P acted with the reflexes of a Ninja warrior to scoop up said chicken in his free arm, use of the other arm being impeded by virtue of the fact it was carrying a huge dead chicken in a carrier bag. Mr P was now in somewhat of a predicament, standing, as he was, in the back garden, wearing a dressing gown, with a dead chicken-in-a-bag in one hand and a live chicken with half-mouse dangling form beak (tail swinging from side to side) in the other. I would like to say that at this point I heroically leapt to his aid but I was hampered in my ability to do so by:

1) not being able to breathe or remain vertical as I rolled around on the floor in hysterics
2) finding myself incapable (physically or mentally) of extracting the half-mouse from the chicken’s beak

Eventually, the chicken with the half-mouse, being shaken vigorously and at length by an exasperated Mr P (who after all, just wanted a shower), was forced to drop his precious find. At this precise moment, live chicken number two appeared out of nowhere and with the skill and dexterity of an international rugby player, scooped up the half-mouse in her beak and ran the length of the garden followed by a couple of victory laps, parading the wretched half-mouse like a macabre trophy all the while.