I promised you chickens
Here they are, the Four Chooks of the Apocalypse. Just tiptoed out and snapped this. As you can see, their feathers have all grown back in and they’re looking fit and ready for Winter.
Angry chicken has issues. Woe be unto anything that perches near her of an evening. I let her have a go at me, so the other chickens can settle in for the night unmolested. I don’t mean she gives me a good pecking; I mean she takes a big beakful of the tender webbing of my thumb and worries it like a terrier. Angry, angry chicken.
Shy chicken is shy among chickens but is the most aggressive with intruders. She’ll lunge at any cat that comes near — head down, butt in the air, wing feathers all spread out. She can make herself look as big as a turkey. The inside cat is terrified of her.
Crazy chicken just plain ain’t all there. She never walks anywhere. She zooms. She is scream-propelled. NYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH flap-flap-flap-flap.
Bossy chicken is the Mary Poppins of chickens — practically perfect in every way. Everybody is terrified of bossy chicken. All Hail Bossy Chicken.
Now, me hearties, I have just learned that I must upgrade my Photoshop by December 31 or I fall off the upgrade ladder (I’m using CS3 and they’re up to CS6 now; that’s as far as they’ll stretch it). Two hundred pounds is a lot of money for me to scare up at Christmas time. That means I must make many lovely, cruel, jug-eared Obama ‘shops in the New Year (perhaps I’ll finally nail his likeness in his second term).
But for now, I need to go away until it scabs over a little. And by “go away” I mean post about chickens and recipes and the stupid things English people say. I shan’t be reading news and political blogs for a while (I don’t know who I hate reading more after a stinging defeat — our side or theirs). Feel free to talk about anything you like in the comments, though.
Have an awesome weekend!
November 9, 2012 — 2:29 pm
Comments: 60
Big Bird for president!
If you want President Big Bird big and in color, you can have President Big Bird big and in color.
October 9, 2012 — 3:58 pm
Comments: 18
Important Chicken Update
I don’t know how many angels fit on the head of a pin, but I can tell you how many chickens fit on a wooden chair: four. Okay, probably six in a pinch, but I’ve only got the four.
I swear I didn’t put them up to it. I went out the kitchen door, and there they were, looking thoroughly cheesed off with everything and everybody.
At some molecular level, they know Fall is coming. They’ve shut down egg production and they’re molting. Molting: their feathers are falling out. Great clumps of them. When I open the henhouse in the morning, it looks like they’ve been having pillow fights all night. They have bald spots and spikey bits where the new feathers are growing in. They look dreadful and they’re crabby as hell.
You know when they show pictures of rescued battery chickens, and they’re all bald and fucked up? The big farms dump battery chickens when they reach a year old, during their first molt. Not that factory farms aren’t dreadful, but those chickens look like shit for (mostly) perfectly natural reasons.
Blogging chickens. Not blogging politics. Politics was stupid today. Chickens are less stupid than politics. Even molting chickens.
September 18, 2012 — 9:57 pm
Comments: 32
My new best friend
Meet my new bestest friend, Denty the Brain Damaged Herring Gull. I tried to get a closer picture, but he was being coy tonight.
Uncle B named him Denty, on account of he has a pink featherless dent right between his eyes. It’s like if his head was made of clay and you gave him a good poke with your index finger, like that.
Pretty clearly, somebody got off a damn good shot at him (as people around here will do) and he survived. He’s loopy as a bastard, though.
Of an afternoon, he (I guess it’s a he) lands at the peak of the roof, and then slides down the tiles sideways, surfer-like. Usually pretty skillfully on his feet, but occasionally on his butt. Our roof is l-o-o-o-ng. Then I flip pieces of stale bread into the grass for him and he stalks around stabbing them with his beak.
The chickens are afraid of him, the cat is fascinated. And me, I grew up a thousand miles from the sea, so I don’t have the coastal person’s native disgust for gulls. I think he’s pretty cool.
For a brain damaged flying rat.
July 25, 2012 — 11:08 pm
Comments: 16
In which Weasel scolds a naughty chicken in a most satisfying way
When our first two chickens, Mapp and Lucia, were little, they spent a lot of time trying to establish dominance. Mostly by belly-bumping each other like beerful rednecks at last call. It was hilarious. (Lucia eventually won…boy howdy, did she. She’s the capa di tutti capi of backyard chickens).
The second two didn’t do that. Violet is a half-pint but she’s a cheeky, aggressive little shit — well on her way to the #2 slot and just waiting for Lucia to stumble.
Vita, from the outset, was a shy, passive bird. Big, blowsy, slow. Very beautiful.
They pick on her something horrible.
It hurts to watch. The chasing and pecking was bad enough, but eventually Vita lost the will even to run. She’d lie beak-down in the grass and just let the others peck at her until they got tired. (First time I saw it, I thought she’d dropped dead of a heart attack and they were trying to wake her up).
I try to spoil her with little treats, but she’s as scared of me as she is of the other chickens.
Now, generally speaking, it’s best to let animals get on with it. Sometimes, when you try to interfere in the social hierarchy, you just make things worse for the underdog. And, sure enough, Lucia and Violet eventually satisfied themselves that they’d proven their point and are content these days with the occasional head-fake in Vita’s direction.
Not Mapp. She’s crazy evil by nature, and it’s +100 when she’s broody. I have to turn her physically off the nest in the mornings now. She emerges into daylight blinking, stumbling, feathers sticking up all over, making croaky rook noises and mad at everything. Especially Vita.
She takes a special delight in catching Vita off guard. The poor bird will make herself a nice little wallow in the flower border, off to the side, away from the others, not harming anybody, and just as she spreads her wings in the sun and drifts away into bliss, Mapp pounces.
Honestly, there’s only so much of that up with which I can put.
So I bought a Super Soaker. Well, not a Super Soaker, a cheap Chinese knockoff called a Special Gun. Worth every penny of my £4.99. With a little practice, I can splat Mapp several chicken lengths from Vita’s wallow. You know that “mad as a wet hen” thing? Totally true. Huh.
Screw behavior modification, I haven’t had this much fun since I sold my arsenal and moved to Gun Control Land.
June 18, 2012 — 11:24 pm
Comments: 35
Chickens. Eating catfood.
Wow, is it midnight already?
Busy day. Took Mapp to the vet (she’s the ginger one, top left). Possibly myco infection — swollen eyes, general lack of condition. She got a shot and an antibiotic tonic for her water. She was a real trooper at the vet’s, too. Go chicken!
Then there’s the Jubilee celebration this weekend. I’m on the entertainment committee. Really. Off out buying bunting and beer. Her Maj has given her subjects a *four* day weekend. Sixty more years!
Anyhoo. Back here. Tomorrow. Six WBT. ROUND 32. Be here or be somewhere else!
May 31, 2012 — 11:21 pm
Comments: 35
Mutual of Freaking Omaha
Seriously, this is in my back yard. Actually, has been for a week. They don’t nest here; they nest up the canal somewhere. They come to this spot — mama, papa and seven cygnets — to catch the afternoon sun.
Thank goodness for the ditch between us. Papa swan lunges and hisses when I get close to take pictures. I’d just as soon not test the old wives’ tale that these things can break a man’s arm.
There’s another happy family unit up the creek aways, by our neighbor’s farm. Six babies plus two unhatched eggs. Sadly, just three babies this morning. Stupid foxes.
I saw our lot again this today and they’re all okay. So, woot.
May 29, 2012 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 30
Bad day, drink now
Ugh. I let a pot of turkey broth boil dry this afternoon. I mean *really* dry — I didn’t notice until I spotted the smoke pouring out of the kitchen window. Had to have all the windows and doors open for the rest of the day, which was bad because it’s cold.
And also because one of the hens has gone broody (yes, same daft bird as last year). I shut her out of the henhouse to keep her off the nest, so she kept wandering in the open doors complaining about being shut out of the henhouse. She spent the day zooming into the livingroom going “squa! Rarr! Nyer!” Which is like the chicken equivalent of that old lady pushing the shopping cart going “titties! Knickers! Assholes!”
Enough. Me for booze, bath and bed.
God, it stinks of immolated turkey carcass in this place.
April 10, 2012 — 10:04 pm
Comments: 45
Aiiiii…they’re getting ahead of me
Anybody want an omelet? I had my first ever four-egg day this weekend. I’m never going to keep up at this rate.
Last year, the two little girls were too little and one of the big girls went broody and stopped laying after dropping a dozen on me.
I didn’t know she was broody. Inexperienced chicken keeper that I am, I feared Mapp was eggbound. This is no joke and can be fatal, so I spent a few days soaking her in buckets of warm, soapy water and — oh, dear, this is no joke either — greasing up her vent with olive oil. I’m not proud.
Prolly why she thinks I’m a rooster. I go anywhere near her, she adopts the ready-to-mate poultry “come hither” posture.
I wish that was a joke.
You know, if you aren’t a sentimental slopbag like moi, chickens are awesome livestock. They lay delicious eggs nearly every day, they will happily subsist on table scraps and bugs and bits of shit they peck out of the lawn, they will make more chickens given half a chance and the — ahem — surplus chickens are delicious roasted or fried.
March 19, 2012 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 38
Hang on, it’s coming!
First!
Fully two weeks earlier than last year.
Lucia, of course. Good old Lucia, Boss Chicken. She’d laid 132 eggs when I stopped counting last year (once the little girls started, it was harder to tell who laid what).
Mapp, by contrast, has laid 13 eggs in her whole stupid life — she didn’t start laying in the Fall when Lucia did, and she spent the entire Summer broody, trying to hatch rocks and straw and bits of junk. In any other household, she’d for the pot, but she’d probably poison us. Crazy chicken.
It felt like Spring today, too. If we can just hang on a little longer…
February 16, 2012 — 11:15 pm
Comments: 25