The new little chickens arrived last night. We had to get more hens, as we were down to one hen and the rooster. Chickens are social animals, so a flock of two was barely adequate, and ran the risk that if we lost another we would have one lonely, sole fowl rattling around in the run. We got four more, which could mean we end up with rather a lot of eggs, but lots of things could go wrong between now and when we get the hypothetical egg mountain.
I tend not to mention when we lose a hen, unless it is to a fox. They are pets, of a sort, and we are fond of them, though not in the same way as the cats. They don't come into the house, or have individual names, and we don't cuddle them, though during a bird flu scare my brother asked me rather nervously whether we did, and I could imagine him weighing up whether or not he should ban us from contact with his family, in case we infected his children. The trouble with telling anybody except a fellow poultry keeper that one of your hens died is that you don't get a sympathetic response. Instead you are quite likely to get a joke about bird flu, one of those awkward jokes that (a) aren't actually funny, and (b) fail to hide the joker's underlying anxiety, in this case about about bird diseases that might spread to humans. Or else a comment along the lines that you don't seem to have much luck with your hens.
The trouble with hens is that they do tend to die. We've had a couple that battled on to a grand old age, and several that became fox food soon after arrival. One pair of young hens persisted in foraging along the edge of the wood, instead of staying in the front garden, and they were picked off one after the other in short order. One old lady jumped on to a low wall, and fell off it stone dead, presumably of a heart attack. One developed an impacted gizzard immediately after we bought her, as a result of eating something unsuitable. Two or three just began to look poorly over a period of days, and then died. Reading poultry forums we seem not to be alone. Still, we don't generally talk about our losses. If all of them died one after the other I'd call the vet and resign myself to the next bird flu epidemic possibly having started in my chicken house, but so far each loss has been an isolated incident, the rest remaining perfectly healthy, so I've put the deaths down to one of those things.
The last chicken we lost had a stroke. We are pretty confident it was a stroke, and not Newcastle Disease (a notifiable virus infection that causes paralysis) because she went to roost right as rain, and the next morning I found her lying on her back under the perch. I put her the right way up, thinking that this didn't look very good, and she got neither better nor worse, but seemed paralysed. It was the weekend the snow came, and it seemed inhumane to leave her out in the cold in the chicken house, so we put her in a cat basket in front of the Aga, covered with a towel. Occasionally she scrabbled noisily against the wire basket, and most of the time she was quiet. She ate a small amount of wet bread, and seemed to possess a great will to live, but was disabled below the neck. This was the same weekend the grey tabby fell ill, so we had the cat fading away before our eyes in the study, and the hen insisting on living even after we had both begun to hope she would die in the kitchen. It was horrible, and faintly ludicrous. After we had taken the grey tabby on her one way trip to the vet, the Systems Administrator had to round off a miserable morning by taking the chicken outside and giving her a merciful dispatch.
Now is not a good time of the year to buy hens. Left to their own devices they go off lay in the winter, so young hens which have reached the point of lay tend to become available from amateur enthusiasts in the summer, having developed from eggs laid in the spring. The Systems Administrator tracked down some commercial suppliers of hens to hobby keepers like us, and ordered four on-line. I think commercial hen producers use artificial lighting to keep them laying in the winter months, so that they have hens available at all times of the year. We have gone for Speckledys this time, instead of pure bred Marans, partly because that's what we could get, and partly in the hope that they might have better constitutions than the Marans. The Speckledy is a hybrid cross between the Maran and the Rhode Island Red, with dark feathers very like a Maran, but a slightly more prolific egg layer. They were developed in the 1990s for organic commercial egg producers, who wanted something that could free range and laid pretty brown eggs, but was more productive than the pure rare breeds. They are said to be friendly birds, and they should be large enough to discourage the cats from getting any improper ideas.
The new little hens came from somewhere near Blackburn in a dedicated chicken delivery van operated by two cheerful blokes, who scooped them out of their travelling box and put them into our hen house. They arrived at about 7.00pm, so the existing chickens were already roosting. The delivery men didn't seem to think there was a problem putting them straight in with birds they didn't know, which is just as well, as we only have one hen house, and so do most other amateur poultry keepers. Letting them get to know each other gradually might be the ideal way to do it, but was not a practical option. Our two are nice with other chickens anyway. When their late companion collapsed they showed no signs of picking on her, and if anything they looked rather worried. I have never seen any signs of feather pecking, vent pecking or other bullying in the run.
The new little hens are terribly sweet, and don't look quite large enough to start laying yet, but that doesn't matter. We aren't in a great hurry for loads of eggs, as long as we got company for the other two chickens, and we can start letting them out into the garden fairly soon. The eggs can come later (if all four little hens survive then probably rather a lot of them). I think they spent the night huddling together in the egg laying box, all four of them, and today they explored the hen house, where they have food and water, but wouldn't come out into the run. Of course they may never have been outside, but I'm sure they'll get the hang of it. They have little undeveloped combs, and little anxious faces, and look as though it is all a bit much for them, at the moment.
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