goodbye old lady

Only four hens ran out of the pop hole when I opened the chicken house this morning.  I checked in the nesting box to see if one was laying an egg, but she wasn't, so I looked in through the window and saw a black body lying crumpled below the perch.  It was the old lady Maran.  She seemed fine yesterday and earlier in the week, flocking as normal with the Speckeldies, so she must have had a heart attack or stroke in the night.  She was very, very old, for a chicken.  We tried to remember when we got her, since she predates the Speckeldies and we are now on to the second generation with them.  I thought she must have been seven or eight, and the Systems Administrator countered that she was more like ten.  Either way she had a good innings.  She stopped laying eggs a long time ago, but seemed happy enough in her retirement.

The Speckeldies wolfed down their morning sprinkle of porridge oats and sultanas as eagerly as if nothing had happened, and stood bouncing on the spot and staring at me hopefully in case I was going to give them another treat.  It has to be said that they do not appear grief stricken, though I have seen hens exhibit fellow feeling for other birds.  The big tabby once caught a pigeon and reduced the hens to hysterics by eating it outside the hen run, while rabbits suffering a similar fate have left them completely unmoved.

Nobody told the Speckeldies they were allowed to go off lay at this time of year, and they have been churning out eggs all winter at a phenomenal rate.  They are a  Rhode Island Red - Maran cross, bred for the commercial organic free range egg sector, and we went for them instead of getting more rare breed pure Marans because the Speckeldies sounded as though they would be good doers.  They have been.  They are not quite as large as the Marans, and the eggs are not quite as dark a brown, but they certainly exhibit hybrid vigour.  They seem nice natured hens, and do not bully or peck each other, though that may be partly down to their having a large enough run that they don't have to be in each other's faces all the time.