I have added two more chickens to my flock. I have a soft spot for the traditional “brown hen” and am channeling my inner Beatrix Potter.
The brown hens are historically good layers, and they’re so pretty to look at. On a more practical note, I have family coming for the summer, and could certainly benefit from some more egg production.
A neighbour has kindly offered me two of her hens. And this is where the fun begins!
The plan:
Like a thief in the night, I will be infiltrating their current home and snatching the chickens while they sleep (if you’d told me a year ago that this is the stuff I’d be doing living on the farm, I’d have laughed). I know my neighbour has at least one rooster in her hen house, and with my new fear of roosters thanks to the epic cock fights between Henrietta (girl name, I know) and I in the barn, (picture the rooster lunging at me with his big neck feathers and talons sticking out and me kicking and screaming over and over again until my foot finally makes contact with his head and he backs off…), things might get a bit hairy.
While I fancy myself to be brave in most situations, a strange hen house in the dead of night, with roosters and only a flashlight between me and god knows what, I have some trepidation as to how things will go down. Maybe I’ll bring my daughter along for bait….
The thinking behind this midnight abduction is that, if the chickens are moved while they are sleeping, when morning comes and they find themselves in new surroundings, they just think that they’ve been there all the while. Are they really that dumb? Quite possibly, me thinks.
With nervous giddiness, I await nightfall.
To be continued….
So that was not scary at all. What I wasn’t expecting though, was how sad I felt. At nine o’clock last night we all traipsed into the dark towards the hen house, flashlights in hand, the element of surprise on our minds. The little roost was quiet until we opened the door and shone our lights inside. Inside, the rooster and his girls were all perched for the night and obviously rather displeased at us bursting in and disturbing them.
My neighbour picked up the first hen within reach and plopped her into the waiting carrier. Then, the next one followed. The birds were obviously unnerved, and I felt terrible! And while, logically, I can’t compare our actions to those of some dark, clandestine subterranean strike force, there was something disturbingly deceptive in our actions. I know: they’re just chickens. But still….
We drove home and wrangled them out of their cages and up onto the perch next to their new family. We closed the coop door, sad but determined to do our best to help them along in their new home.
This morning, although they’re roaming the property in two distinct groups. “The ladies” – my existing brood – are coexisting in relative harmony. Henrietta, the rooster, is a bit out of sorts, running from one flock to the next like, well, like a chicken with its head cut off! He is trying to sort it all out, and has his hands full with two new additions that seem to have fallen from the sky.
Meanwhile, life goes on at the farm. I have one eye on my dishes and the other on the ladies. The kids are fighting over their choices of names. The dense fog that we awoke to this morning is starting to lift, and coffee is brewing.
Life is good!
RuralRoots 