Once upon a time, in an autumn long long ago, the soggy spot between the chook yard and the custard apple tree looked like this: a jumble of useful greens – mizuna, tatsoi, bok choi, watercress, borage, rocket and giant purple mustard.
Some months later, thanks to a super-dry July, the chickens’ enthusiasm for salad and our squeamish wing clipping (as fellow chicken-blogger Julie Adolph notes, “chickens are not penguins“), this is mostly what the salad patch looks like:
Borage: it’s a survivor. Apparently it’s an unfashionable term in ecological circles these days, but I reckon mustard leaves (“too spicy!”) and borage (“too furry!”) are the the climax community of our salad patch.
In theory, you can eat borage leaves – they taste like cucumber. Very very hairy cucumber. The flowers are gorgeous though: fab in a salad, especially thrown in with some fire-engine red nasturtium flowers and perhaps faded yellow (rather chewy) blooms of aragula, or the tiny white floral clusters that sway around the garden when you let daikon radish go to seed. The idea of freezing blue “starflowers” in ice cubes for fancy-pants drinks rather appeals to me too.
I suspect we will have more borage flowers in time for ice-clinking weather. It self seeds very reliably, it seems, which troubles me a little, since we’re a hop skip and a jump from the edge of the bush. Easy enough to pull out, though, and a bee-flower too. There’s the usual unsubstantiated talk of companion planting – in this case with strawberries, which I imagine must look good at the very least. I’ll keep an eye on it: it may have to be exiled, like lemon balm, that enjoyed our shady slope just a bit too much, or the eye-catching but definitely weedy red orach. But for now, I’ll keep pleasing the bees.
Someone’s been eating eggs. I don’t mean us, although obviously we have been eating them, and with great relish too.  I tried and failed to take a photograph of this morning’s scramble, that glorious renaissance of the freshly-laid goog. It seems that these eggs are simply too magnificent to be captured by mortal photographic technology. All that remained on film was this ineffable golden glow.
No, I don’t mean us, the authorised Egg Robbers. Some other creature has been eating eggs. It could be a rat or a possum. It could be Snakey the Diamond Python – there was a mysterious predatory smell in the garden over the last couple of days, along with scattered beige feathers. Andy Ninja was looking distinctly rumpled, like an ambitious nocturnal reptile might have tried to make her, perched temptingly amidst the lower branches of the coral tree, a late-night snack . But I fear it may be…. a Cannibal Chicken.
The kids are on the case: “We questioned each of the chickens, by showing them an egg. Shyla and Treasure were interested, but not too interested. But Luna went close to it… too close. I think she tried to peck it.” So, after this exhaustive forensic investigation, Luna is in the frame (in a possible miscarriage of justice, Abbey the elusive Barnevelder escaped questioning by being impossible to catch).
Who is the inner Luna? Who can say, although the disturbing photograph suggests an interior vortex and a single glowing eye. Beware, Luna, we will be watching you…
Huge day at the home farm. Palm Beach, the mid-century style hen shack, has seen its first eggs. No need for the planned lessons in nest box use. We can give away those scavenged golf balls – these savvy youngsters have no need of ersatz eggs to tell them what to do where. Noble failure is our usual thematic here, but I do love it when a plan comes together.
The question is: who laid those eggs?
When I heard someone down in the chook yard doing the egg song a couple of days ago, I assumed it was our brilliant but erratic – well, just erratic – veteran layer, Snowball the Silky Bantam. But is this egg the work of a bantam? Yes, it is small compared to the ostrich eggs we’ve been buying from the shops lately, but small enough to be Snowball’s? And what of those suspicious dark feathers? Perhaps some eggsperts out there can advise us (sorry!).
Could it be that at seven months old Abbey the Barnevelder is all grown up? Should we be getting out the red bunting and throwing her a full moon party? Only round-the-clock viewing of Chicken TV will tell us for sure.
Here’s me thinking that Chicken TV involved humans watching avian melodrama unfolding in their own backyard. Little did I realise that Chicken TV is, in reality, chickens relaxing in front of the spectacle of me doing DIY. Forget the twitter feed on Q&A, this is truly interactive television, featuring tea-thievery, butt pecking and repeated attempts to use powertools.
The occasion for this viewing pleasure was a revolution in gate-making – my first not entirely constructed of bamboo, zip ties and chicken wire. This one is constructed from a superannuated IKEA bed frame (ok I cheated. I also used some hinges, paint and one additional length of pine). The original intention was to keep an ancient dog, visiting for the fortnight, away from the poultry. As it turns out, the tiny, arthritic dog and the strapping teenaged chooks settled into a comfortable state of mutual disinterest. The project had gained its own momentum by then, as gate-making activities always seem to do.
I was feeling mighty self-satisfied about my bed-gate, despite the “chookhouse tolerances” of my dodgy carpentry and the ominous creaking of overstrained hinges, and started to warm to the prospect of keeping the livestock out of the native shrubbery. As my nine year old said “You’d don’t know our chickens, mum”. And and sure enough, within ten minutes, there was Shyla, marching up briskly and forthrightly up to the back door.
Tiptoeing down to the bottom of the garden through the midwinter gloom (or, to be precise the astronomical twilight) for some last-minute salad greens, I hear a sudden clang in the chook yard.
It’s grandpa. Well, Grandpa’s patented galvanised iron chicken feeder, slamming shut. Something’s been chowing down on the chooks’ supper, and it isn’t Andy Ninja.
According to the manufacturers, Grandpa’s are vermin proof, requiring the heft of a chook to access the munchies inside. And we carefully checked the skies before training our girls, since apparently cockies, despite being lightweights, comparatively speaking, have be known to figure out to jump mob-handed on the foot-pedal to get to the goodies. And it’s not a brush turkey, for all their proprietorial air. It’s after their bedtime.
In my fantasy life, my garden, as well as being effortlessly fecund with nature’s edible bounty, is an ideal habitat for rare and exciting native creatures. The clang, in this universe, would be a shy and endangered Long-Nosed bandicoot, taking a detour from its usual diet of grubs and tubers to snatch a mouthful of scratch mix, as if to assure me, through this moment of dietary eccentricity, that I am walking lightly on this earth.
In fact, I’m pretty sure we do have bandicoots in the back yard, but I’ve only once had a fleeting glimpse a white bum disappearing into a disorderly pile of prunings (or “habitat” as I like to think of it). If they are attempting to communicate with me through the medium of conical nose-holes disturbingly close to my seedlings, I’m not quite sure what the message might be.
In my nightmares, on the other hand, the visitor at dusk is a Liverpudlian Super Rat, that somehow sneaked into the shipping crate when we left the UK seven years ago and has been loitering in the bottom of the garden ever since, disembowelling cats and swallowing brush turkey eggs whole. Okay, the Super Rat may be not all bad.
There’s a more endearing rodent possibility: perhaps it’s a hard working and cooperative clan of mice, like the very cute singing ones in Bagpuss.
I could hide behind the generous leaves of the custard apple and try to catch the interloper in the act. But since there’s a sharp westerly blowing and further research is bound to disappoint, one way or another, I think I’ll allow the Clanger to remain a mystery.
What noise does a chicken make?
Some people might go for the classic “cockadoodle dooo!” of an rooster at the crack of dawn.
But many people probably come up with something like this: “Buck buck buck buck” (here’s a video example). That’s what chickens sound like to most of us.
In fact, this is a specific type of chicken alarm call. It means “Ground predator! Watch out!“.  In this video, there’s a cat on the prowl. However, this call sounds so familiar to us humans, even those of us who are not chicken obsessives, because we are ground predators. So what we think of as “normal chicken sounds” say less about what chickens normally do, and more about the fact that we’re there, and they’re keeping an eye on us.
Chickens make at more than twenty four different calls (check out some of them on this very interesting video), which are not only referential (“aerial predator” “food” and so on) but are uttered differently depending on who’s listening and what’s going on. In fact, they can be quite machiavellian, deliberately “lying” (for instance, some males make a food call to attract females when there’s no food to be had – though since chickens can recognise and remember up to 100 individuals, this is not a good long term strategy!) They are pretty cunning too. In a recent article in Scientific American K-Lynn Smith and Sarah Zielinski explain how researchers resolved a problem: why do roosters frequently call out a warning about a passing hawk even when this might attract the hawk’s attention and put the rooster himself at risk. They found that roosters are very strategic. For instance, they observe that “a male calls more often if he is safe under a bush and his rival is out in the open, at risk of being picked off by a swooping predator. If the rooster is lucky, he will protect his girl, and another guy will suffer the consequences”.
To sum up, chickens are smarter than humans usually think (if not always nice), and humans… well, humans are ground predators.
So much excitement over such tiny seeds (or more accurately, in terms that will never be used in an up-market menu, even after the zombie apocalypse: “abortive seeds resembling sawdust“). Check out the mucky faces of these lorikeets. The yellow tailed black cockatoos love them too. At first, there’s just the occasional thump of the prickly round fruits hitting the deck, as if there’s a poltergeist at work. Then you hear a rustling overhead and a plaintive mewing, like a kitten stuck up the tree.
Don Burke doesn’t like liquidambar: they have thirsty roots that will choke your pipes and lift your pavers.  But the 20 metre tree at our place shades us and our epiphytes in summer, lights up the yard in autumn, and by May, let the scraps of winter sun that makes it over the hill slide in through our front windows. The piles of fallen leaves get kicked up by the kids, scratched through by the chooks and dumped under the trees as easy if messy mulch. With my pro-native plant prejudices I wouldn’t have planted it, and if the sewage pipe backs up I’ll come to hate it, but it’s easy to love a deciduous tree.
It was all going so well. The warrigal greens were flourishing, even without being regularly urinated on. Deep-rooted sorrel was a stalwart when pretty much nothing else was happening in the garden at all. Both were in high rotation in the kitchen. I’ve always been a bit cautious about using them raw, since, along with other garden staples like rainbow chard and rhubarb, both of them have a fair bit of oxalic acid, which if you overindulge and/or are unlucky can cause kidney stones (although the idea that the latest “miracle foods” might have the potential to be dangerous causes outrage in some) . Given that rainbow chard, which is also quite high in oxalates, always has escaped animal attention, it seemed too much of a coincidence that the beasties seemed to leave these plants alone: those smarty pants critters were sensibly avoiding intestinal distress .
But look at my poor greens now:
Something is clearly tucking in.
There are a number of possible suspects. Judging from the robotic squeaks and buzzes in the undergrowth, there are satin bowerbirds still around. Rumour has it they are fond of fresh shoots – I blame them for the tatty foliage of my now past-it Purple King beans. It could be the chickens of course, but though the four new girls spend a lot of time in the area where the warrigal greens are (or were… *sniff*) only tricksy skinny Shyla regularly scoots through the gap in the bamboo gate into the veggie patch where I’ve planted the sorrel and, more recently, rhubarb (the leaves of which *are* toxic to humans, and have also been chewed in the last few days). So, in the absence of an extensive literature review on comparative rodent, marsupial and human tolerances of oxalic acid (I have tried!), I’m blaming rats or possums. I guess definitive evidence would consist of creatures with particular glossy pelts. Or creatures rolling around with excruciating abdominal pain. Or both.
