For a gardening blog, we get our fair share of disappointed p@rn watchers, or so I surmise from the viewer stats*. Having excitedly entered the search terms “nude” and “naughty birds”, it must be a real passion killer to find yourself reading about pied currawongs defoliating my pine tree. And I do pity the devotee of BDSM hunting for “rubber” “bondage” and “backyard” and coming up with a pic of my bespoke, soft-to-the-claw chicken perch. So I suspect it’s possible that some of the readers of this post may be disappointed not to encounter saucy black-and-white photos of girls in revealing military uniforms leaning provocatively over the wooden glider (built for an escape attempt from the Nazis’ high-security prisoner of war camp) known as the “Colditz Cock“.
But surely even elderly erotica enthusiasts couldn’t fail to be charmed by these pictures of the real chicks that have arrived in Colditz, our predator-proof chicken enclosure, this week.
“Dunk her in cold water” was the hard nosed advice RB’s workmates gave to get our broody Light Sussex Treasure out of her nest full of golfballs and plastic easter eggs. Then it came to me in a flash: I’d been stonewalling our eight year old’s pleas for baby chicks for at least a year – and this was the perfect time to give in. I put two and two together and came up with five: five little fluffsters – two Barnevelders, a Barred Rock, an Australorp and a patterned Leghorn.
RB collected them from our local supplier of fancy vaccinated hens to bourgeois urban chicken lovers on Friday, and Operation Instant Motherhood was put into action later the same day`. Sneaking into Colditz in the dead of night kind of breaks with tradition. Equally, I’m sure no escape attempt was ever made with a peeping chick in either hand. But slipping the littlies underneath Treasure’s wing wasn’t the nerve-racking part of proceedings. That came at dawn as the youngest and I stole into the coop to see whether our broody was a natural mother or a natural eye pecker.
It was a close thing for a while. Treasure seemed disoriented and faintly hostile at the unexpected transformation of her golfballs into hatchlings, as well she might be. There were a few savage pecks, which thankfully caught my reproving hand rather than the chicks’ tender eyeballs.
Then Morgan, the feisty pattern leghorn, stepped out from under a wing towards the bowl of chick food. She was spotted and instantly froze. Treasure stayed curiously immobile too. They stayed stock still for at least a couple of minutes (to me, dwelling all the hard work and poo removal involved in raising chicks in an indoor brooder, it seemed like an eternity). There was some sort of transcendental moment in which all things seemed to somehow resolve themselves, and the vision of five cute little bloodied corpses laid out on the floor of Colditz began to dissipate.
When Morgan tentatively stepped forward again, Treasure left her in peace. In fact, after watching the little ones tucking in, she started to refuel too. She seems to be eating in a new and odd way, crunching the chick starter in her beak as if breaking it into tiny chick-friendly pieces and making a new short clucking noise that I think means “try this, it’s really not too bad“.
The chicks seem most interested in eating bugs, including a range of invisible bugs from Treasure’s face, which seemed to endear them to her tremendously.
If Treasure has come round to mothering, Snowball the silky bantam seems to be longing to join in. She spent most of Saturday doing laps of Colditz, looking for the entrance to a secret tunnel. Silkies have a reputation for being exceedingly motherly, so I’m assuming she wasn’t spoiling for a fight, but I’m not sure we’ll smuggle her in with the others quite yet. We’ve been told to leave it til the chicks are ten weeks old before we let them demob and mingle with the older chooks and, of course, the young team of brush turkeys (or “flying disease vectors” as I sometimes like to call them) hanging around our backyard.
There probably isn’t going to be a happy ending for every one of the chicks stationed in Colditz. Our copybook is far from unblemished and there’s a worrying rattle in Treasure’s chest (I fear sputum rather than gold). But I guess it wouldn’t be top rating Chicken TV without the plot twists, the high drama and the fear that any day now those enchanting characters might meet their doom.
*Yes, WordPress knows a lot about you, noble reader, but then, if you live in Australia, every petty official has access to a complete collection of your metadata without a warrant, so better get used to it
Previously on Chicken TV:
6 thoughts on “Chicks in Colditz: this week on Chicken TV”
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Well, after this post I think your stats from “interesting” searches is going to skyrocket! 🙂 Hilarious. I’ve only had a few dodgy searches on my blog so I must be doing something wrong. The last one was “hot teen guys without shirts jetty” and they arrived at my Wellington Point nature post. I hope the searchers enjoyed the harlequin beetles!
We’ve also had our share of perpetually broody hens and tried various “cures.” One hen was a crazy little bantam and I ended up using her to sit on a few turkey chick eggs as the turkey mums were pretty hopeless at rearing them. It was a huge success. She even hatched a few duck eggs which I thought was amazing given that I’ve noticed some ducks tend to regularly dampen their eggs to help with humidity and as a chook she didn’t do this.
Thanks for the laughs! 🙂
You’re right. What with all the dodgy terms, this one is an open invitation! I think my early enthusiasm for “Carry On” films may be at the back of my odd visitors – I do like the odd double-entendre. Don’t you wish you were a fly on the wall when the “hot teen guys” searcher met your beetles!
I do feel sorry for Snowball. She’s been broody about a thousand times and would no doubt make a terrific mother. Next time! Maybe putting chicks under them is a bit like an intermittent reward scheme for rats though – they’ll come to think the golfballs really with hatch into babies, and will be broody all the more!? Let’s hope not!
And the latest weird search “Is there any python that vomits diamonds?” Sadly no Sherlock Holmes era burglary tips here!
Hahah. Search terms and even some spam comments can be quite entertaining at times! By the way I should have written harlequin bugs instead of beetles. I don’t want to upset the entomologists.
Yes, you don’t want to make the entemologists antsy (boom boom!)
No you wouldn’t want them to get antsy (see what I did there?)