leghorn | Berowra backyard

Happy Easter from Morgan the syncretic leghorn

We have pommie chooks! Or from somewhere north of the equator, anyway. I’m not sure how they managed to make the perilous transcontinental journey before their cute fluffy butts made it to our place at a week old, but somehow they must have dodged border control.

4 fluffy butts horizontal crop

How do I know our feathered friends come from the far north?

Well, here in Sydney, we’re past the equinox and the nights are drawing in. We may have had a February that smashed heat records, 1.3 degrees C above the longterm averages. But it’s hours of daylight that tells chickens when to get laying (thanks to that sort-of-third eye) and the days are getting shorter. Even as the world goes to hell in a handbasket, it is, nonetheless, autumn.

And yet my chooks have decided to start laying. Just in time for spring with its baby bunnies, and peeping chicks, and Easter eggs, and its celebration of rebirth and renewal. In the northern hemisphere, that is.

Cleo the Barred Rock

Tigress the Barnevelder

Abby the grown up Barnevelder

Cyan the Australorp

I love Easter. Most religious festivals are a delicious mish-mash of stuff from the Big Book and whatever else people were into at the time. But with Easter the syncretism is really out there, bouncing around with its ears pricked up, laying coloured eggs in the spring greenery. After witnessing the pre-Good Friday panic by shoppers terrified by the prospect of a day without ready access to a new packet of Cocopops, the nice young guy at the checkout reckoned we might add a zombie apocalypse to the usual combo of vernal equinox, Passover, and frenzied confectionary consumption. As he pointed out delicately, Jesus did after all, come back from the dead.

Baby Morgan last October

Morgan with adoptive mother Treasure, five months ago

In the midst of this cultural mash-up, it seems appropriate that it’s Morgan the flighty leghorn, named after a Welsh enchantress in an Arthurian legend, who has marked the occasion of the (deeply seasonally inappropriate) Christian festival of rebirth with the gift of her first lovely white eggs.

A muddled pagan blessing to egg eaters, one and all.

Morgan and Treasure these days

Morgan and Treasure chowing down

Morgan checking it all out

Chicks in Colditz: this week on Chicken TV

Cute chick butts – I know I’m asking for trouble here.

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.

Morgan having a drink

Tigress keeping a lookout while the other chicks eat bugs

“I know she’s cute but DON’T WAKE HER UP!”

“Hi there!”

Cyan takes a ride

Taking a snooze – or being garotted. One of the two.

“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.

Nom nom nom

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.

Bug eating

Butt bug eating

I *think* she’s enjoying the experience

Morgan discovers the joys of trad

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.