Broody Hens
Big Fat Momma is in the Cooler again. I’ve renamed the Chicken Coop the Chicken Clink, as it was the only way to make sense of Christopher’s ridiculous monikers for the newest generation of chickens. They all sound like prison names to me. So BFM – the queen of The Clink – is currently in solitary to cool off because she’s broody. Again. She goes broody with alarming regularity. For the uninitiated this means she will retreat to a nesting box and stay there for days on end trying to hatch her eggs. This would be fine if her eggs were fertile – but they aren’t. For regular readers who are now presuming that Geoff the cockerel must be underperfoming – this isn’t the case – Geoffrey is a bantam cockerel and we keep the bantams separate from the full size chickens. In the bantam run Geoff performs morning, noon and night – it’s pretty relentless for those girls. But for the chickens it’s different. There isn’t a cock in the clink. So to speak.
Anyway I digress – even if we remove BFM’s eggs, she’ll just stay put on an empty nest trying to hatch imaginary ones. You can’t ignore a broody hen because she will take the job of sitting on her eggs (real or imagined) so seriously that she may well forget to eat or drink and will lose condition – or worse – die. The best way to stop broodiness is to cool the hen down. I do this by putting her in a cage which is raised on bricks so she can’t make herself too comfortable and start nesting – she has to perch. The cage is protected from the rain and wind and has its own supply of food, water and grit. It’s actually an old puppy cage which has been recommissioned for the purpose. So it’s spacious, safe and boring. Importantly, the other chickens in the clink can still see BFM while she’s in the cooler – as it sits right in the middle of the chicken run – if we removed BFM from the clink altogether for a week or so while she cooled down then we’d upset the whole pecking order when we reintroduced her.
If you’re interested, currently the hierarchy looks like this:
-
Big Fat Momma (queen of the clink)
-
Little Titch (BFM’s daughter, the favoured one)
We then have a group of three:
-
Red (starts fights)
-
Vera (wants to dethrone BFM and become queen – definitely evil)
-
Franky (bit of a sneak – hangs out with whoever is the most popular)
And lastly a further group of three much younger hens:
-
Bitch (vicious)
-
Doreen (nice but dim)
-
Scrounger (steals food)
To complicate matters – and because he has trouble remembering names – Christopher sometimes refers to the hens collectively. He calls the first group of three The Supremes and the second group The Beverly Sisters. Clearly I’m not about make a complete idiot of myself by using these names – can you imagine me having to call the vet and say ‘can I make an appointment to bring in the Beverly Sisters?’. I rest my case - we’re sticking with the prison names for now.
I think the inmates should probably have their own TV series - “Hens Gone Bad”, or maybe “Chicken Wing”. So anyway – we’ll see how long it takes for BFM to sort herself out - when her comb turns red again (currently pink) I’ll know she’s earned her freedom again. In the meanwhile she’s pretty peeved about being in The Cooler. See for yourself.
Big Fat Momma in The Cooler
By Camping About In The Country
I have been hunting for a superlative. ‘Busy’ just doesn’t do justice to the last few weeks. The culprit is our eco camping enterprise, which, thanks to being taken on by some people called Canopy and Stars (www.canopyandstars.co.uk) , has gone totally ballistic. It’s more canopy than stars to be honest, given that what we offer by way of farm diversification is two tents, and a converted horse transporter. But that doesn’t seem to put people off. So Sarah has been chief chambermaid (regrettably without the frilly hat and lace apron but I’m working on that), bottle washer and reception girl. I am assistant engineer, wood chopper, that odd bloke who drives a tractor.
All of which is an utterly novel experience for us, so we’re learning on the job. Like the fact that some campers can’t tell the difference between food waste and newspaper so the well oiled recycling system goes to pot.
The day starts at 6 when I get up to light the log fired shower. It ends at 11pm when we both fall into bed utterly knackered and go straight to sleep. With another long ‘to do’ list facing us the next day. But Sarah is in her element, shining with fervour, so busy I think she wishes the walls weren’t in the way, it would make her journey shorter.
Meanwhile we got the hay in without too much trauma except the landrover throttle cable snapped and then the clutch went on the Super Major I was towing it and its trailer out of a field with. This was akin to last year’s Landrover pond dunking exercise, and distracted me for a couple of days, but we got through it.
Plans are now afoot to build a mobile thatched cottage and a wood cutters hut for next year’s offering. I am serious. And so busy I don’t have time to write any more. Got to go.
By A School Visit
I had an alarming experience today. I was transported back in time half a century. Yes, half a century. That’s half a whole lump of history, a lot of which has already been dissected by Simon Schama and Hollywood on telly. A class of eight year olds came for a school visit, to learn about bio-diversity. As they formed a crocodile and were made to hold hands with someone they hated to walk down the green lanes being lectured at by a wrinkly old git (me) about hedgerow life, wild flowers and grasshoppers, I remembered 1954 (OK, so more than half a century) and a similar event.
The other scary bit was to discover that I am married to a natural teacher. Sarah is brisk, cheerful, has a fistful of notes, can answer any question thrown at her (including ‘how did you kill your pigs? Did you stab them?’), and has a first aid kit, a pond dipping net, a two bug catchers in her bag, as well as having perfected a speech on biodiversity that’s taken me 20 years to do badly. So I feel old and I’ve not done my homework properly.
Actually, I’m also really lucky. I’m the only one allowed to ogle Sarah’s bum and get away with it, and I have to say, she looks a killer in khaki shorts and T shirt. The kind of teacher one fell in love with 54 years ago.
Animal Count Rises Again
The great rabbit massacre reduced our vacillating livestock count to 28 (it had been 27, plus three lambs minus two rabbits). As of yesterday it is at an all time high of 34 because we bought six chickens to add to Big Fat Mama and Little Titch’s caravan group. However, there is some doubt as to how many will remain. It’s entirely possible that at least two are cockerels and Geoff is one cock too many for most of us anyway. Three would be a nightmare, especially if grown up chickens. The neighbours would probably get ASBO’s taken out on them. We’ll see. Wendy, who sold them to us (and had had a massive massacre of her own – 30 went in one swoop of a psychopathic fox), was convinced she’d had a chicken which had been a hen for two years, and then became a cockerel. Fish changing sex is one thing, but chickens?
The other great event was the arrival of The Cooper. The Cooper is the mobile log fired shower designed and built mainly by Peter Cooper, AKA The Hermit of Whitebread Lane, with a little help from me. Mainly holding spanners. It is a marvellous machine, and here’s a picture of it. What’s more it works. 45 minutes and about five logs produce a long hot shower. I’ve got a diagram of how it works and at last I understand steam engines. My main concern is that it would blow over in a high wind. 30 gallons of water perched ten feet up on a slender steel frame is not exactly stable. There’s showers, and then there’s showers.
The Sheep Lose Their Wool And Two Rabbits Lose Their Lives
Nature is fickle. She offers up three unexpected lambs – and Sarah is almost embarrassingly besotted with special needs Frank – then slaughters George and Mildred, the oldest surviving rabbits. In between, all adult sheep got sheared, which included the resentful Shetlands who had been busy trying to shed naturally. This made them look as though five small boys in jumpers had leaped through a thorn hedge. Peter, the whopper of a Romney (and a little bit thick too) had been carrying about six kilograms of fleece. So now I’ve got a barn full of sheep’s wool which will sit there while Sarah doesn’t turn it into felt or spin it, like she didn’t last year, until I put it all on the compost.
This morning tragedy struck the rabbits. Something – a werewolf? A bear? A great ape? – leapt into the rabbit run (over a five foot fence), onto the cage, and stamped its way through until it could rip Mildred’s head off. Then it killed George, although since there wasn’t a mark on him, it’s possible he died of shock. And I don’t blame him. The carnage was horrible – why rip the head off a rabbit, take it away and leave a whole meal lying next to the unharmed body of its mate?
Sarah is distraught, and I don’t blame her. I don’t really have much affection for the rabbits, but I also don’t like violent death. And there seems to be a slight flaw in nature’s extraordinary way of sorting out supply and demand, in that demand is usually vicious, and supply wrenched screaming from the source. Does it really have to be like that?
This is the story of a rural life, lived by Sarah and Christopher on their 40 acre Wealden farm, near Rye, which they share with assorted animals, wild flowers, trees, an eclectic array of locals and the odd visitor who thinks it's an idyll. Sometimes it is.
