Screw politics
Violet laid her first egg! Afterwards, she was subdued and thoughtful for the rest of the day.
That means both new girls are in lay now. Plus Lucia.
Mapp, on the other hand, is not having a very good Summer. After going broody for months, she got over herself only to begin the moult. Lucia is so ticked off with her, she’s been pulling feathers out of Mapp’s collar one beakful at a time until the back of her neck is totally bald.
Hence, three nights running, Mapp has come to the back door at bedtime and resolutely refused to go into the henhouse. I’m letting her sleep in a cat carrier in the laundry room. There are Mappfeathers EVERYwhere.
Chicken drama.
Plus, Uncle B got up the onions and the taters for the year. The onions will last most of the Winter, the potatoes…well, I reckon there were at least thirty pounds there. Plus runner beans, French beans, cabbages, cukes and cauliflowers. The tomatoes haven’t done great this year, but we’ve got some.
You know, the rest of the country could pour gas over its head and light a match, and we’d get along fine out here.
August 10, 2011 — 10:13 pm
Comments: 46
Breakfast in bed
So this morning, I open the various chicken run doors, and all the chickens tumble out except Vita. I worry about Vita — she’s the big, beautiful, shy chicken all the others peck on. She lives in a state of perpetual, panting anxiety, does Vita.
So I looked in the house, and there she was, sitting on the floor, panting anxiously.
I lifted her out and sat her on my knee and was having a good look at her when something hot and heavy landed in my lap. “Great,” thinks I, “Monday morning and I’ve already been shat upon.”
But, no — it was a egg! Poor Vita was trying to lay one when I swept her into my lap.
Her second, not her first. Her first was day before yesterday. I knew it was coming because this usually shy bird was all over the place, under hedges, hopping into the kitchen cabinets, flying onto my arm, clearly looking for a quiet spot. I popped her on the nest in the big girls’ house, and soon she disburdened herself of a perfect tiny egg.
Instinct is a wonderful thing.
August 1, 2011 — 10:18 pm
Comments: 11
Um hm. I expected as much.
Much to the surprise of absolutely no-one, the fox came back last night. I set up the wildlife cam to point to the chicken runs, knowing the likelihood.
Click the picture to be whisked away to YouTube and see for yourself. It’s cut together from five clips (the camera shoots 15-second chunks), all in quick succession around 3am.
He’s a handsome brute, isn’t he?
July 12, 2011 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 26
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To get away from the thumping great fox.
No, no…everyone’s fine. Just. The chickens let out a terrible squawking a few hours past, and I ran to the window just in time to see Lucia flap by, followed by Vita, followed by a sleek young fox.
I yelled “FOX!” and hit the door, which was enough to turn him around. Bastard. He was within inches of getting one of my nice birds.
I scooped up Vita, found Violet (O clever bird, she had flown perpendicular to the commotion), checked that Mapp was in her usual place (sitting on the nest trying to hatch a lump of wood), but of Lucia…nothing.
She had lit out up the stairs and into the driveway into forbidden territory. Our drive is fairly long and lined with trees and shrubs and long grass and stinging nettles. There must be a thousand places a panicky chicken could lay low. We spent an hour walking up and down the drive calling her name and listening for the cluck before Uncle B spotted her — clear across the road, over the fence and into a sheep field.
Busy road. Lucky chicken. She was allll kinds of freaked out when I went to collect her and did a little panic dance every time a car went by. So really, having no other tools at my disposal, I shoved her under my shirt to get her back across. I’m not sure either of us will recover from the indignity.
Got back to find our outside cat, the unfixed male, had peed a streak of scent mark right across the face of my banjo. Is that a compliment?
July 11, 2011 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 29
Don’t mess with Number One Chicken
Lucia was always…the boring chicken. Pecked stuff. Made quiet clucking noises. Kept out of the way.
Then she started laying eggs and became a whole ‘nother bird. Still a steady, quiet chook (and a reliable five-eggs-a-week layer), but she is — no doubt about it — Boss Chicken.
First thing in the morning, everybody gets one good peck (just to remind the flock who’s boss), and then it’s happy family for the rest of the day. (Except Mapp. Clearly fed up with this broody bullshit, Lucia gets a big beakful of Mapp’s neckfeathers and tugs until the poor crazy bird runs ’round and ’round in circles shrieking).
Uncle B tried to shoo Lucia off the vegetable patch the other day, and she reared up to full height and stood him down. Like, “young man, do you know who I am?”
She has one vice: a fascination with sneaking in the kitchen door. We’ve never scolded her for it, but she’s quite furtive. We have to watch ourselves in the morning, as we are apt to find her unexpectedly underfoot.
I suspect my crap housekeeping is to blame; all those delicious bits of cheese and potato chips, just lying around for a chicken to find.
I don’t care. She’s never yet shat upon the floor, and she’s a hell of an automatic floor sweeper.
Heh. My Roomba makes breakfast.
June 16, 2011 — 10:28 pm
Comments: 20
Madd Mapp
Mapp has always been our most eccentric bird. Vocal. Excitable. Flappy. Chases dickie birds. Chases cats right out of the yard. She’d probably chase cars if she had the chance.
She didn’t start laying last Fall. She didn’t start laying right away in Spring. I always said if she ever laid an egg, she’d be a total drama queen.
Boy howdy. She laid four eggs and promptly went broody. X-treme broody.
“Broody” — for all three people out there not currently keeping chickens — is where chickens go to become mothers. They lay a clutch of eggs and then sit on them day and night for 22 days until they hatch. (Eggs don’t develop until warmed to hen temperature, so they all hatch the same time and same developmental age).
Frequently, though, a chicken will go broody without a clutch of eggs to sit on. And when that happens, how does she know when to stop? She doesn’t. Stupid chicken.
Pekin bantams are famous for going broody. Hard broody. People use them as incubators. Someone told us a horrible story about accidentally mowing his pet bantam to death because she was brooding in the high grass and wouldn’t get off the nest.
As of yesterday, Mapp has been broody for eight weeks. Just sits in the empty nest box all day. Shrieks and screams if anything goes near her.
Once or twice a day, I lift her off the nest and make her stretch her legs and eat something. She sits immobile in the grass for a few minutes, then shakes herself off and develops a kind of chicken Tourette’s.
“NARRRGH!”
“Mnyeh!”
“EEEEEEEEEEERch!”
Which I guess is chicken for “titties!” “pee!” “assholes”
Then she eats something and goes back on the nest.
I think that hen needs a good mow.
June 15, 2011 — 9:36 pm
Comments: 23
Violet: number three and climbing
And then there’s Violet, who is tiny and fearless. I think she’ll always be small (contrast to big, shy Vita).
Voted the Chicken Most Likely To Fly Onto My Head and Tug Painfully at the Delicate Hairs at the Base of My Neck Several Times a Day, Violet is the only chicken that seems to like being picked up and carried. Or riding about on my shoulder (no luck teaching her to say “pieces of eight” – so far).
Though she’ll squeak and run when chased, I’ve seen her pluck treats right out of the boss chicken’s beak.
We’ve taken to calling her “Violence” and reminding her that she doesn’t solve anything and she’s not the answer.
But who are we kidding? That cheeky little runt will be Numero Uno chicken some day.
June 14, 2011 — 9:48 pm
Comments: 17
Profiles in Poultry
It’s a cinch nothing as fun as Weinergate is going to happen this week, so let’s look at my chickens! Chicken baseball cards, as it were. The new girls are coming up on 14 weeks, and already my little flock has established a clear pecking order.
This is Vita. She’s the very bottom of the hierarchy, poor thing. She’s big, beautiful, sweet, shy, slow, clumsy and everybody picks on her. She doesn’t even try to get her share of treats. I throw a few bits her way, but she’s scared of them.
When chased, she honks like a mistreated squeeze box. At rest, she makes a pi-cuck, pi-cuck sound, like an oil can.
I’m hoping she doesn’t have some kind of congenital weakness in her legs, because she’s always been a lumbering, slow thing. Given a choice, she sits. Last week, she actually went lame and limped around the garden pitifully for a few days. Worried us quite a lot, but she seems back to normal now.
Whew. I wasn’t looking forward to telling a vet I had a gimpy chicken.
When she’s all growed up, it’s clear Vita is going to be the biggest and most beautiful chicken in the whole flock. And still they will pick on her.
June 13, 2011 — 10:05 pm
Comments: 20
Awwww…
Hitler. Really.
It’s from this collection of rare photos of famous people, that I think I got via a tweet from Kottke.
A tweet from Kottke. These words apparently have meaning on the planet I am currently visiting.
And if you want to give yourself a slow burn (of course you do! We’re political junkies, after all), have a browse through regulations.gov. Kevin Williamson of NRO helpfully points to the regulations controlling what you can and cannot do with an imported monkey (good news! You can give him cocaine!).
Annnnnnd….that’s it! Uncle B spotted a rat in the henhouse tonight, so we’ve been out shoring up the edges of the run with bricks. I have paving slabs laid down as a floor, but there was a gap just big enough for the little bastard to tunnel in. A rat can kill a sleeping chicken, though he was probably going after their food dish.
May 26, 2011 — 9:57 pm
Comments: 19
Important chicken update
Eleven weeks today, which is about halfway to point-of-lay (20-24 weeks). They’re starting to look like proper midget chickens, aren’t they?
We can let them roam more or less freely now, as long as one of us isn’t too far away. The cats ignore them, but Mad Mapp occasionally gets one cornered and gives her a right pecking.
This involves not much actual pecking, but an hellacious amount of squeaking and bugling.
I did nothing all day but sit in a lawnchair occasionally poking the TURN PAGE button on my Kindle and flicking bits of my lunch to the chickens. And a herring gull, two ring doves, several crows and an assortment of dickie birds.
Local birdlife has decided I’m an inanimate object.
Eh. Déjà vu. I was fifteen. On the farm. Sunbathing in the back yard, I opened one eye to see buzzards circling high overhead.
May 24, 2011 — 10:38 pm
Comments: 21