From battery to backyard

I’ve been following the activities of our local battery-hen rescuers – Let the Ladies Go – for a while.  Every few months they take a couple of thousand chickens from a local chicken farmer.  ISA browns lay like machines for a couple of years and then their fecundity tails off a bit – egg producers want to get new, younger hens at this stage.  The farmers who supply Let the Ladies Go choose to hand the older chickens over rather than slaughter them.

We’d been thinking about taking some rescue hens for some time, and when Let the Ladies Go sent out an urgent call for help on a sunny weekend when we had no commitments, we took a drive to beautiful rural Cooranbong with a big ventilated cardboard box.

The horde of rescued chickens seemed pretty happy wandering around their giant holding pen in the bush, but the logistics of feeding and caring for thousands of chickens must be mindboggling.  The rescuers take the really sick and injured chickens – the paralysed, the totally featherless, the partially blind – indoors to nurse them back to health (with the help of hand-knitted chicken jumpers and chicken nappy pads).   So our girls, like all the others in the yard, were surprisingly healthy, if only patchily feathered and with slightly clipped beaks.  We planned to take a pair of chooks home but in the end got talked into taking three, thinking that if one pegged out, the two remaining girls would still have each other for company.  But all three chooks – Ruff, Crumpet and Dusty – have made it (so far, anyway).

When they first arrived the girls’ experiences of captivity were pretty visible.  I was too disorganised to have their enclosure totally sorted, so when we got back from our drive we plonked their cardboard box, top open, in the yard, while I got creative in my favoured artistic medium – zipties and bamboo.  All three of the girls were quite capable of flapping out of their box, but they sat tight for an hour, scarcely noticing that escape was an option.  Which was lucky in a way.  We wanted to keep our existing chooks physically separated from the new girls for a week or two – although they could suss each other out through the chicken wire fence – until the rescue hens built up their strength.

Over the next fortnight we got to see them learn about the outdoors: the taste of sweetcorn, autumn leaves underfoot, the touch of sun on their feathers.

Ruff and Crumpet enjoying 2

Eventually, feeling more confident that the rescue chooks weren’t bringing disease to the backyard, we let the two flocks mingle. The new girls weren’t entirely happy to find that their bucolic patch in the sunniest part of the garden was a favoured hang-out of the incumbent chooks as well.  In particular, Winter the leghorn, low on the established pecking order, proved to be tyrant.  “Winter is coming” …. something strike fear into the heart of an ex-battery hen.

Needless to say, there were ructions when we decided it was time to move all the hens into Colditz, our predator proof cage, recently upgraded with a light-sensitive automatic door.  Because chickens are up with the sun, but these humans generally prefer not to be.

Winter was not happy about the girls moving in on her territory.  The new automatic door – the world’s slowest and bluntest guillotine – starts shutting when as lumens drop to single digits.  The new girls make an effort to get into the cage as the darkness began to gather but Winter stands, beady eyed, by the door.  The minute she turns round to head to her roosting quarters, though, they’re in like a shot.

Shima Cyan and Big Jenny

Shima the barred rock hanging out with the next door neighbours

The rescue chooks have settled in now, with only the occasional bit of light argy-bargy.  The new girls are even laying eggs – with the lengthening days, we’ve just started being able to give our neighbours the occasional half-dozen.  But more to the point, the rescue hens are really charming.  They seem quite egalitarian – they get on well as a threesome, and there’s minimal aggro between the three of them and our other chooks.  They’re curious and interested in investigating the world around them.  And they like people.  When I’m down in the garden, they loiter nearby, expecting all of the good stuff.  They’re much more sociable than the chickens we’ve looked after since they were week old balls of fluff – well, except for the loveable Apricot.

Apricot portrait 2

It seems strange that animals who have been treated, on the whole, quite badly by human beings nonetheless expect fine things from us.  Maybe there’s hope for us after all.

More backyard chicken adventures

The life and times of Andy Ninja, the escape chicken

Who’s eating our eggs?

Brushturkeys v chickens

Twilight of the chickens

Reflections of a ground predator

Death, hot compost and chicken addictions

 

What’s inside the bird cage?

Not artichokes.

I spent all of last autumn dreaming of artichokes.

In the three years since my last bumper crop, which grew splendidly with no attention at all while we were half a world away, I have tried and failed to get more magnificent edible thistles towering over my veggie patch.

Our garden is a challenging environment for any seedling.  I suspect the sad fate of the last two generations of artichokes can be attributed to the deep gloom that descends on the yard around the time of the autumn equinox.  But there are other possible suspects in the frame…

Yes, rabbits.  My transition to the Mr McGregor, the homicidal carrot fancier in Peter Rabbit is now complete.  But so far I’ve avoided GBH with a shovel.  Instead I got me a fine flock of bird cages.

A budgie lover in Berowra must have had a mass break-out just before the last heavy rubbish day and I was the lucky beneficiary.

But my visions of bounty weren’t to be.  I’m not sure if some small but dextrous herbivore lifted up the tiny food hatch and sneaked in for a unappetising meal of baby thistles or if the artichokes lost the will to live in dank captivity.  On the upside, budgie cages are evidently great at keeping rabbits off your rocket.

Not strawberries

So, there are no artichokes in my bird cages.  And so far, there’s no strawberries either.

My other score from the last council cleanup was a load of aviary wire and some nice hardwood architraves.  A few bucks on hinges and I was able to put into place the final stage of my termite-assisted plan to reduce my erstwhile (and totally pointless) garden path into rotten timber. My aim: to grow strawberries under the flight path of the gate-that-used-to-be-a-bed.  Or more precisely, to grow strawberries for human rather than chicken consumption.

I was pretty happy the outcome of my chookhouse-tolerances joints, held together with an assortment of mixed screws from the jar at the back of the cupboard.

Thus far the chooks haven’t managed to break in but the strawberries seem somewhat oppressed by their location.  Every day is a bad hair day.  I’m hoping they’ll be ugly but productive but the signs don’t look good so far.

On the bright side, lazily throwing scratch mix over the gate has produce a little protected patch of green in the razed earth of the chook yard.  I’m not sure the strawberries enjoy the competition from wheatgrass, but the hens have a hippie feast every time I do the weeding.

Fewer chickens than there oughta be.

Sadly, on one bleak and rain drenched evening in the middle of winter, most of our hens weren’t in the birdcage either.  Only Cyan, bottom of the pecking order thanks to her gammy eye, and Treasure, broody as usual, were in Colditz, the predator proof cage, when a hungry fox came to visit.

Only one of the chooks that had been perched in the favoured roost, the potted fig tree, survived, a fairly run-of-the-mill Barnevelder whose name we could never quite remember.  After the slaughter, we renamed her Xena as a mark of her prowess in battle.  Bold and beautiful Cleo, curmudgeonly Snowball, at least 8 years old, feisty Morgan, shy but reliable Abby and inexpertly named Tigress all disappeared or were found in bits in the yard the next morning by the shellshocked RB.    Given the sad end of Shyla under similar circumstances at the same season the year before, you can only conclude we are poor chicken keepers and, frankly, very slow learners.

So now, come rain or shine, you’ll find our remaining hens locked up every night.  At the moment, it’s a lonely night for Xena, locked up in Palm Beach.  Her mum, Treasure, laid low by has some mysterious ailment, has been in the intensive care ward in the laundry, while one-reviled Cyan has now attained the pre-eminent position of queen of Colditz, adoptive mother to three new day-old chicks.

Fortunately, Xena can always rely on her playdates.  Just like next doors’ kids, the neighbours’ hens nip through gap in the fence and hang around outside waiting for our girls to be let out for the day.  They share a feed and if we’re lucky lay an egg or two on our side of the “magic portal” (to clarify: we get eggs from the chooks but sadly not the kids).

Three cheers for the return of stay-at-home scrumping!  Low-level food thievery without even leaving your own backyard.

And no baby brushturkeys

Until they’re 12 weeks old, the chicks are confined to Colditz along with their adoptive mum, in case they get eaten by a kookaburra or pecked to death by one of their loving aunties.  None of them are taking imprisonment well.

Smuggling the chicks (sexed and vaccinated and genetically disparate) under relentlessly broody Cyan at the crack of dawn was a doddle. Especially compared the sleepless night I spent as a ignorant featherless human trying to keep the wee things safe and warm in a cardboard box under a desk lamp without setting the house on fire.

chicks-in-sunlight-eye-open-crop

They were happy at first.  But these days, the chicks and their mum spend most of their time pacing the length of the cage, apparently hoping to find a hidden exit.  Their only distraction is the thrill of scratching through the bug, straw and leaf litter mixture left in the potato patch after this year’s laughably miniscule harvest of spuds.

They’re particularly plaintive when they have visitors.

I’m not sure if all that frantic peeping is concern that one of their number has apparently gone astray from the flock, or jealousy that the baby brush turkey is free to roam the yard at will.

The little brush turkey spends a surprising amount of time close by, staring intently into the cage.  Perhaps there’s something more to it than the chick crumble dropping through the wire floor.  One night, tiptoeing down to shut in Xena for the night, I saw him roosting there, right on top of the cage.  Strange behaviour from a chick that never meets its siblings or its mother, let alone snuggling together with them at night.

Chicks in Colditz: this week on Chicken TV

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:

Having fun with no money

The untimely death of our favourite chicken Shyla has generated unaccustomed scenes of activity in our backyard.

We are not a dynamic household.  We are a posse of ponderers and ruminators, hoarders and procrastinators, ever ready with a “let’s not rush into things” or a “perhaps we should pause to examine this problem from all angles”.  In a disaster movie, we would be the bit-part characters who are consumed by a rising tide of magma while considering our escape plan from the easy chair with a view of the volcano.

But all that changed this week.  Fate intervened, in the form of a generous Hungarian freecycler whose guineapigs had gone to on a better world, leaving behind them the Taj Mahal of pet enclosures.

They say money makes the world go around.  But does it really?

Just add up all the things people do for love, or for family, or to be neighbourly or because it seems like it might be a hoot, and all stuff you can grow or swap or get as a hand-me-down or find by the side of the road (or, if you are my boat-building neighbour, at the bottom of the creek).  The gift economy may not have its own stock exchange, but things would grind to a halt pretty quickly if all the tuckshop volunteers, weekend soccer coaches and grannies with strollers called it a day.

As Noam Chomsky says in this fab video “We don’t have a capitalist system. No capitalist system has ever survived“.

Freecycle is a case in point.  With a trailer and a tolerance for cyberloitering, I reckon in less than three months you could completely furnish a McMansion without spending a cent.  Your home would admittedly be rich in bulky exercise equipment, large lamp shades, and clothing for the under threes, but still, the sheer quantity of stuff on offer is impressive.

And that’s without even considering what you can buy with the local currency – the Opera – in Sydney’s community exchange system – bartering with more bling, I guess you could call it.

Our new chook house was miracle of timeliness.  Fabulous finds on my local freecycle facebook page are  snapped up almost instantly.  In fact, even implausible things like half-used bottles of shampoo to be collected immediately from Mona Vale seem to be claimed with surprising speed. The new predator proof run – Colditz, as I’ve provisionally named it – turned up just before we headed off for an out-of-town family weekend.  Without the generosity of strangers, our chooks would have been an all-you-can-eat buffet for the newly emboldened feral foxes.

And then there was the gift of Dave.  Having eyeballed pics of the cage on facebook and figuring it was a shonky wood and chicken wire job of the sort I might cobble together myself, I reckoned if I knocked off work early, RB and I could wrestle it onto the top of our old Subaru Forester.  But hearing of our dead-chicken woes, Dave, RB’s workmate and ex-trucker, insisted on driving down from his place on the Central Coast, an hour away, to help us out.

And thank god he did.  Turns out our new 3 x 1.5 x 1 metre chook run is has rivets, a steel frame and weighs as much as a Panzer tank.  I could no more have lifted one end of it to head height than unicycled to the moon.  Dave, on the other hand, had the Hilux, the roof-rack, the reversing skills, the muscles and the shipping-big-things savvy to sort it, no wuckers.  Thanks Dave.  You are a legend.

It may not have the casual elegance or aquarium-lid clerestory window of Palm Beach, my own vernacular modernist masterpiece, but Colditz has a number of winning design features – most impressively, a sliding roof to cut down on the lower back pain associated, for inconveniently tall adults, with egg collecting (I’m hoping child labour will make the sliding sun roof unnecessary, but my track record of achieving such outcomes is poor).

What the new coop lacked, however, was a roost.  Having googled what the modern chicken requires of a night – apparently, just like in the contemporary bathroom, square is the new round – this is what I came up with.  Soft on the feet, in a range of widths for chickens of all shapes and sizes.

It looks disturbingly like bondage equipment.  Who would have thought old bicycle inner tubes and a repurposed wooden ladder could be so kinky?

It is possible that the girls prefer something a bit vanilla.  Given a choice, they seem find their way back to Palm Beach at dusk, where they can sleep in a egalitarian fashion, all on the same dowdy round perch, without even a whiff of rubber.

But don’t worry, with a bit of discipline, we’ll soon sort that out.

Love, death and stray cats

It’s not often that I find myself on same page at Tony Abbott, Australia’s climate change denying PM.  But having exhausted the potential of their previous three word slogans, the conservative government recently moved on to a new one: “Kill the Cats”.  After this week’s events I think I could find some common cause with Tones on this theme.

I know you shouldn’t have favourites but Shyla was my favourite chicken.

She came to our place as a bundle of fluff and managed, uniquely, to survive our enthusiastic but doofus chick rearing.  She was the hen you would trip over at the chookhouse gate, where she would be pacing up and down the second the back door opened.  And then she would follow you round the garden waiting for lovely things like grapes or curlworms or weevil ridden comestibles and if none of those were forthcoming, peck your butt to see if it would make an adequate alternative.  Her response to a human approaching was to squat and jiggle in what I think translates loosely from hen as “ok, you can mount me now”.  Which was faintly disturbing, while at the same time suggested an affection of some strange kind.

And that’s not even mentioning the fact that she was our one reliable layer, producing a daily egg all winter long.

Since she was such a useful, friendly and characterful girl, she was obviously the first choice for a midnight snack when a great big feral cat came visiting our yard in the dead of night this past week.  I don’t want to sound callous but the bloody thing could have taken Snowball the silky bantam – smaller, ancient, more visible in dim lighting, huffy around humans, laying eggs only when the weather and the tides are just right.

But no, it had to grab Shyla, the life and soul of the backyard. The Top Chook took one for the team.

Everyone’s very subdued down in the bottom of the garden now, accepting the indignity of being carried, half-asleep, from their perilous perch on the edge of the fig tree barrel, to secure lodgings in Palm Beach, the long-abandoned vernacular modernist chicken coop.

Shyla was the victim of our hubris – the one who paid the ultimate price of six years without locking the chooks up at night.

So what changed in our suburban ecosystem?  I reckon it’s the departure of the (somewhat annoying) little yappy dog next door.  The neighbours on the other side have a laconic German Shepherd who doesn’t even chase the chooks.  But the yapster would have given a cat a run for its money.  If Tony and cronies want to get rid of feral cats, it’s not red-necks with guns that will do the job.  Scientists reckon the best strategy is to restore the top predators – dingoes.  Based on anecdotal evidence – the death toll in our backyard – I reckon they’re right.

With sufficient vigilance we can protect the chooks but we can’t do much for the bandicoot that still noses its way through the veggie garden at night.  Bandicoots recognise dingoes (and dogs more generally) – they know to avoid them.  In fact, some scientists have argued that this makes dingoes – placentals, only here for 50,000 years or so – natives.  But bandicoots still haven’t figured out cats.

I’m trying to find some positives in the situation.  My latest planting of broad beans has sprouted, magically unmolested.  I could attribute this success to my lavender mulch, or to the carefully secured veggie net, or the cold weather that has probably driven the local rodent population indoors (where we live.  Gulp.)  But perhaps the feral feline took a few rats as a chaser after devouring poor Shyla.  It’s a choice, it seems, eggs or beans.  Not fair!  I want both!

It’s all very sad.  Our eight year old got it right as she sobbed herself to sleep the other night: “you know where there’s someone in your care and you can’t protect them, you feel like there’s a hole in your heart”.  Yeah, babe I do.

I’ve been thinking about another lost lovely one this week.  The twelfth anniversary of our son’s death has just passed us by.  Born, unexpectedly, with a lopsided and innovatively organised brain, he was a bonny baby boy, whose plump little body suffered many seizures and would never really do quite what he wanted.  He had a short but lovely life, that ended suddenly and surprisingly (we shouldn’t really have been surprised) before dawn on on a beautiful winter’s morning, just like these last glorious days.

For a time, during the relentless rumination that followed our sleepy newborn’s diagnosis, I spent a lot of time thinking about stray cats.

Stray cats crapping in our pocket sized backyard.  Stray cats with a payload of toxoplasmosis gondii, “one of the most successful parasites on Earth”.  It inhabits the bodies of around half of the world’s human population, and plenty of other warm blooded animals too, but only reproduces only inside pussycats, emerging to infect other creatures, the parasite transmitted through cysts lurking in its poo.

Recently there’s been a pop science fascination with the consequences of toxoplasmosis infection.  While (most of the many many) infected people are asymptomatic, researchers have found that rats with the parasite become risk takers.  Losing their natural fear of cats, some even become attracted to the scent of their predator (not coincidentally, the parasite’s host).  Humans with toxo, too, seems to have somewhat different personalities than those without.  This idea, that humans – philosophers and planet conquerers – might have our very selves shaped by a single celled organism, disturbs and fascinates us.

If you are unlucky enough to be infected for the first time in the early weeks of pregnancy, your baby can be born with congenital toxoplasmosis, with possible serious consequences for the child’s health.  Toxo can cause problems with vision and hearing, seizures and intellectual disability.  Which is why I found myself thinking so long and hard, a decade or so ago, about my lack of gardening gloves and the roaming neighbourhood moggies.

In the end, my ruminations about infected cat shit went nowhere, like the dwelling upon dioxins from the incinerated corpses of foot-and-mouth infected cows that filled the air that year, or my endless Googling on the chromosonal origins of pachygyria (“Come back if you have another one with the same thing” the genetic counsellor suggested.  We were floored.  Although not quite so amazed as when she asked us, the Scotsman and the Australian, if we were cousins)

Very very occasionally Tony Abbott, MP, is accidentally right: sometimes shit just happens.

How do we make sense of these things, the deaths of our beloved children and the untimely demise of our pet chickens?  How are they connected, the miraculous germination of broadbeans and the midnight movements of predators?  The passing of parasites and personality traits from rats to cats to cat lovers?  The hidden life of the soil and the secrets in our bloodstream that can elate us and destroy us, often at the very same time?

Andy Ninja’s great escape

Andy Ninja was always a chicken with a mission.  She arrived at our place, in the company of her rather macho sister Harley, already in possession of a name that perfectly captured her special qualities, thanks to the penetrating insights of my chicken-wrangling nieces.

Within a year she’d made her first break for freedom.  A quarter acre block just couldn’t contain her ambitions.

Most mornings we’d wake up to find her scratching up the trad in the front garden, her daily constitutional in no way hindered by clipped flight feathers or the locked garden gate.  Then one morning she toodled up the drive and didn’t come back.

There was no tell tale trail of torn feathers, but after a couple of days I tried to gently break it to the kids that Andy probably wasn’t coming back.  All the fox-baiting national park rangers in the world weren’t going to save a chook on the loose overnight on the mean streets of Berowra.

My eldest was in denial.  She hand-crafted a “missing” poster, complete with full-colour portrait and I nailed it over our mailbox.  Some kind of closure at least, I figured.

A week later, I get a phone call from some folks down the street.  Andy Ninja, it seems, was that proverbial chicken who crossed the road.  She had introduced herself to a new family, laid them some eggs and made herself at home in their kitchen.  They were in love with her.  There were childrens’ tears as the unrepentant adventurer was returned.

Don’t get me wrong.  Andy liked to roam, but she knew her own stomping ground. A couple of years back we spent a few months overseas.  While we were gone, some young Swedes rented our place.  They weren’t keen to be small-holders, so our generous and well organised neighbours, chicken aficionados from way back, offered to take in our birds for the duration.

We gave the chooks a week or so to settle into their new high security quarters – a proper coop, enclosed on all sides with wire, with a sturdy dog-proof outdoor run.  After our haphazard fencing and half-baked sleeping arrangements, surely the chooks would be safe and sound in the custody of some proper chicken keepers.

By Day Two, Andy Ninja had made her way home.  I returned from work to find her mooching around in our yard.  We had stern words and passed her over the fence.

On Day Three, she was back again.  Our chicken-wise neighbour assured us confidently that with close wing clipping, there would be no repeat offenses.

We woke up on the morning of our flight out to see this view from the window.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when we arrived in London, to receive a slightly aggravated email from our Swedish tenants asking what to do about the chicken that, despite previous arrangements, had turned up on the premises.

Or to receive another one, a week later, saying that actually, it turns out that they quite liked having the chicken around and what should they buy it for treats.

While we were gone, Andy Ninja was quite the chicken around town, it seems.  Our poultry-hosting neighbours would get phone calls at all hours reporting sightings of a neat brown chicken strolling down the main street.  Was it one of theirs?  Our friends up the drive also got regular visits.  Andy would pop into their shed to learn a bit more about welding, or perambulate through their herb garden to monitor the watering.

She survived abandonment by jetsetters.  She survived a week on her own on the street.  She survived, we suspect, a midnight attack by an ambitious tawny frogmouth, perched, as she was, all alone on the top of the chook dome.  At one point, Andy transitioned to become a she-rooster who crowed in the morning and made eyes at her flock mates.  And then started laying eggs again.  After months under surveillance as a suspect in The Case of the Cannibal Chicken, she emerged, eventually, entirely vindicated.

I have to admit, Andy wasn’t wildly keen when the hefty newcomers arrived and stole her place at the top of the pecking order, but she rolled with the punches.  She was bit miffed when her perch, the chook tractor, was repurposed into a brush-turkey-proof brassica zone, but she sighed and settled down next to the pushy new girls on the edge of the potted figs. She outlived her bikie sister and a large percentage of the world’s twenty billion chickens, with their abbreviated and unfree lives.

But she didn’t survive this week.

Something – maybe Marek’s disease, maybe “wet” fowl pox, maybe both – has rolled through our little flock, despite our middle class pretention of expensive, vaccinated hens.  Luna quietly expired a week or so ago, and despite an attempt to segregate the sick bird, Andy went a few days after.  On her last day, looking horribly under the weather, she simply disappeared, her mysterious ninja powers undiminished by age and illness.

She’s made her final break for it and it looks like she’s got away for good this time.  We will surely miss her.

Tonight on Chicken TV: Roost Swap

The chooks have abandoned Palm Beach, my upcycled mid-century vernacular modernist masterpiece of a hen house.  Its retro roof line and evocative beach-shack colour scheme wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of  Vogue Living with Chickens but it seems these days, our girls feel out of place inside it.  I feel the overwhelming sadness of an artist doomed to be underappreciated during their own lifetime.

Of course, the veterans never saw the appeal of the coop: Andy Ninja unswervingly committed to her lonely position on top of the chicken dome; Snowball, after enduring wearying attentions during Andy’s “cock of the roost” phase, shifted to an exposed position on the rim of a half-barrel.

At first I blamed Treasure the uppity Light Sussex, throwing her weight around.  During our recent holiday, she took up a new role as “Her Indoors”. Friends and neighbours, promised eggs as a quid pro quo for keeping the flock fed and watered, went away empty handed. Treasure kept prying eyes away from her crowd-sourced egg stash with fluffed up feathers and force of personality.

Queen Treasure was enjoying plenty of wing room in the nesting box the first night Luna, Shyla and Abbey decided to perch next to a Snowball by the brown turkey fig.  However, by the following evening, she’d followed the crowd, and Palm Beach, with its rakish verandah, striking use of organic forms for perching purposes and innovative aquarium-lid clerestory window, stood empty and unloved.

I’d like to console myself that this move is not so much a rejection of my design ideas as an embrace of one of the garden’s many “outdoor rooms”.  But before concluding that the chooks’ change of roost simply expresses a seasonally appropriate relish of al-fresco napping, I thought I should eliminate alternative explanations.  Like an infestation of red mites: the bed bugs of the chicken world.

I can now report that the henhouse is now cleaner than my kitchen, with the deployment of a bottle of bleach and a rarely sighted scrubbing brush.  The organic credentials of my garden may have taken a dent but hopefully the chookhouse has had a detox.  The mantra of “form follows function” does come in handy when you need to hose chickenshit out your modernist masterwork – though this is not a feature frequently noted in Australian Architecture magazine.  In the process I believe I may have made a breakthrough in the quest for an eco-friendly alternative to concrete: a mixture of sugar cane straw, wood ash and a small quantity of egg yolk, carefully cured under a sequence of chicken bottoms, makes a substance that could not be moved by a jack-hammer.

I hope the chooks were keeping a close eye on my efforts to pest-proof their home, since the tomorrow’s weather forecast, predicted with 95% confidence, is for rain. If there’s anything more humiliating than spending your Sunday on your hands and knees scrubbing a nestbox, it’s standing in a puddle during a downpour trying to persuade a group of saturated chickens of the merits of functionalist architecture.

Chicken real estate

Andy Ninja has started crowing at dawn. Well, too early in the morning anyway. It’s a reasonable hobby for a post-menopausal chicken without a flock to keep her entertained. However, I fear those living nearby may view poultry crowing at daybreak, regardless of equipment, as in effect a rooster and invoke the “no cockerels in the suburbs” by-law.

She chooses a spot on the rim of an artificial well (one may ask!) right beside an adjacent henhouse to make her morning pronouncements. We suspect she likes an audience and may be pining for company, given her reported daily outings to our neighbours’ shed to watch him welding and her watering the garden. So I decided to make good on a longstanding promise to the kids and buy some day-old chicks to add to the flock. For the mental health and long term survival of Andy and her sexually harassed companion Snowball, rather than any self-centred reasons of future egg-thievery. Obviously.

Turbo the dinosaur       Andy inspects Palm Beach

Three weeks on, Turbo the Plymouth Rock (pictured), Shyla the Australorp and Donna the Barnevelder seem to be impatient to be shot of their brooder despite its comforting heat light and round the clock child companionship.

So I spent the weekend making “Palm Beach”, a pullet hangout and future nesting box out of an ikea footstool, two ancient shelving units, the lid of an aquarium, a panel of hardwood fencing from the last council clean-up and an assortment of fixings.  I’m going for beach-shack cum vernacular modernism, orchestrated with “chookhouse tolerances” (a phrase I plan to deploy as often as possible).  Here’s a picture of Andy making an inspection.  She looked it over, front and back, top and bottom and then briskly hopped out, not even using the steps. “Not enough storage”, was the look in her eye.  Yes, it is a bit small but it has to  fit inside my existing chicken dome (three years young, and primarily used as a roosting spot for the older gals).  The idea is to give get Andy and Snowball time to acquainted with the new posse with a minimum of pecking and, in Andy’s case, mounting…