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.

Murder most fowl?...

It's been a very sad couple of months in Stalag Luft 112B. First, we found Molly dead in the coop one afternoon and then, a week later, Kiev. Neither chicken had shown any signs of illness, so it was quite a surprise to discover that they had woken up dead (so to speak). Looking back on the blog, I see that within a month of the two new chooks arriving, Leia died and some five months later, all three of the original flock had, quite literally, fallen off the perch. One begins to suspect fowl play!

The Construction of Stalag Luft 112B

Over the last few months the ongoing battle between man and poultry (specifically, between me and our two new ladies, Pecky and Goldie) has reached new heights.

In particular, these young ladies are a lot more gymnastic than the previous incumbents. To be even more specific, it rapidly turned out that they were perfectly capable of jumping up on to the fence surrounding the chicken run, and hopping over into the garden. This meant they effectively had the run of the garden.

Now, this meant that there was chicken poo all over the place. This was the reason we had had the run built in the first place, and so it was a bit of a blow that they basically ignored it. However, it wasn't a complete disaster - it just meant that we had to expand the weekend poo patrol to cover the entire garden.

We'd sort of grudgingly accepted that they were going to escape regularly, and resigned ourselves to not walking in the garden in our bare feet again, when the chickens stepped it up a notch. They decided to push that envelope, expand their horizons, and generally irritate me. And so they started going to visit the neighbours.

The first we knew of this was when we got a phone call from our elderly neighbour, asking if we knew that one of our chickens was in her back garden. So we went to retrieve it.

We then noticed that one of them had got into the garden on the other side of us. We had to go and knock on the door and ask if we could have our chicken back.

"Right", I thought, "that's it! I'm improving security on the run, and you're never getting out again!".

And so I added some temporary mesh to raise the height of the fence. We went from this:



To this:



The chickens bided their time. They plotted. They schemed. They drew up intricate plans involving a vaulting horse. And in due course, they started escaping again. One of them made it two gardens away before being ratted-out by a neighbour. I swear one of them was taking the mickey out of the cat, who was staring with rage out of the patio door at it. But the final straw was when one evening the doorbell rang. When I answered, a bloke from down the road was there, and he said "'Ere mate, is that one of yours?". And sure enough, one of our Warrens was striding with magnificent nonchalence down the pavement outside our house.

At this point I went completely Basil Fawlty. I went to the local DIY shop and stocked up on wooden battens, plastic mesh, cable ties, and screws, and built this:



Since building this, there have been no escapes. But I don't trust those chickens, they're definitely up to something. I've seen 'Chicken Run', I know what they're capable of.

All of this construction work, not to mention the time involved, means that the per-unit cost of our eggs is now approaching the gross national debt of a small country in the developing world. I try not to think about this too much.

Blog revamp

A long overdue revamp of the blog due to the sad demise of Leah and the happy arrival of Goldie and Pecky (.......and an imminent rendezvous with our good friends and possibly only blog readers!).

Seed stitch?...

I've been sent this link by a friend and fellow knitter, can't think why!
A prize for anyone who can watch it without at least a small giggle!

Thanks K!

Yes, of course we're going to throw poo at him!

This morning I was cleaning out the chickens. This is standard procedure, something we do every weekend. Part of the process is lifting all the poo that the little darlings leave scattered around their run. I scoop all of the little piles into a shallow tray. At the end of proceedings this in turn gets tipped into the compost bin, where it's allowed to fester in a constructive manner.

After a few days of hot weather, such as we've just had, this is all a very straightforward job, as, not to put too fine a point on it, the objects in question dry out and are much easier to lift.

This morning all was proceeding as normal until one of our Warrens, who are quite gymnastic, jumped from the top of the fence surrounding the run down into the run. I think she thought I was digging up some lovely worms, and wanted to investigate further. However, she managed to land on the edge of the nearly-full tray of poo, catapulting the contents into the air.

At this point time slowed down, so that I could appreciate the full enormity of what was happening.

I looked up to see what had made the noise.

The incoming turds glittered in the midday sun.

The arc of their trajectory was clear, carving a beautiful parabola through the crystal-clear air.

I was covered in a shower of chicken shit.

At this point I think - I'm not sure, but I think - that I may have sworn.

Come the revolution, I know which chicken's going in the pot first.

Clowning around

The chickens have had a rather exciting time over the last few weekends, as you can see!.......yes, that is a unicycle.

Scrambled eggs

Given that we'd been buying eggs recently, we were a bit miffed to find that our new chooks had obviously been laying eggs for about two weeks. We'd been checking the nest boxes regularly and all that time hadn't noticed they'd chosen alternative places to lay their eggs! It was particularly galling that we had to ditch all 27 eggs as we didn't know how long they'd been there!

Eggs galore!

Having found Goldie's stash of eggs, we went to see what was underneath Pecky.............sure enough, she'd obviously been laying for a while too! Though you can't see them all in this picture, Pecky had 15 eggs!

Goldie's Rosemary Bush #2

When we managed to extract Goldie from her Rosemary bush, we were absolutely flabbergasted to find that she had been sitting on 12 eggs!