The chicken who sleeps in the kitchen
It’s been a rough old Summer for this manky bird.
This is Mapp, the ginger chicken. She laid her first eggs this Spring. Three or four of them, then promptly went broody.
It took me almost two and a half months to snap her out of it, but it happened overnight. I put her by herself in a wire cage with a box to sleep in but, daft bird that she is, she preferred to sleep in the open. Later that night, Miz Fox showed up and gave it the old college try. That did it.
Scared straight, as it were.
So she moulted. Lucia, Mapp’s clutch mate, had by this time become thoroughly accustomed to having the perch to herself of an evening, and she damn well liked it. To register her displeasure at the return of the old arrangement, she tweaked all the feathers off the back of Mapp’s neck and head in a sort of reverse mohawk. Plucked her bald.
So now every evening just before Chicken Bed Time, there’s a flutter and a thump and we find Mapp perched on the kitchen stool with a look that says, “no, no…don’t worry about me. Um, I’ll be fine right here.” I have to wait until dark and Lucia is fast asleep to tiptoe out and put Mapp in the henhouse.
Our first mistake was naming these crazy peckerheads.
August 31, 2011 — 11:19 pm
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