chickens unleashed

This afternoon we let the new chickens out for the first time.  We got them last July, when they were young, only about the size of partridges, after one of the old hens dropped down dead and we were reduced to one chicken.  It seemed cruel to keep her by herself, and I tracked down some new Marans via the Colchester Poultry Club's Breeders Handbook.  The old hen initially detested the imposters in her run, and cemented her sulk by going broody and spending most of the rest of summer sitting in the nesting box.  The new chickens were initially too small to let out because the cats would probably have had them, and the mad old lady didn't want to go out anyway.  As the new chickens grew we thought they wouldn't miss what they hadn't known, and decided to defer chicken exercise time until the spring.

This was partly because the weather was so cold and wet last autumn.  Unfortunately the chickens can't go completely free range nowadays, because of the foxes.  When we first got hens they did run outside all day, even when we were both out, and this worked very well for months until the local fox population twigged that we now had poultry.  We began to lose hens in broad daylight, including when we were on the premises.  It wasn't enough merely to be out in the garden: we had to be within sight of the chickens to act as a deterrant.  I was once laboriously putting up some trellis outside my greenhouse, no more than 15 metres from the hen run but not within direct vision of it, when I heard the most terrible shrieking coming from the young hens we had at the time.  I went to see what was causing the hullabaloo and found a fox swarming over the netting top of the run. (Those young hens did not learn from their early encounter with a fox.  Once allowed out they showed a marked desire to make for the outermost edges of the garden closest to the wood, and both were soon fox fodder.  I never really bonded with them).

So what we do nowadays is let them out in the late afternoon, and sit outside with a book or the radio keeping an eye on them (my partner's technique) or garden in their vicinity (my method).  Letting the hens dictate where I work in the garden can mean that I end up with a lot of jobs only slightly done, as chickens can cover a lot of ground when they feel like it.  Some evenings they are great, and come and hunt for worms while I weed and are thoroughly sociable, and some evenings they want to go round and round the house.

The mad old lady, who had not been out of her run since last July, remembered exactly what the form was, and was out of the pophole and eating grass within seconds.  When she was bored of grass she sat on top of the run, which is what she always used to do.  One of the young hens wasn't long in following her, and seemed jolly keen on grass.  The other two young hens took a bit longer to come out.  They wanted the grass, but thought they could maybe reach it if they stayed safely inside the run and put their heads out of the pophole.  The rooster was the last to emerge (I thought he was supposed to be the brave leader, but never mind.  I'd rather have a soppy rooster than a vicious one, and Maran cockerels can be nasty).  For a long while he ran up and down inside the run, looking at his ladies outside it and getting into a state, before summoning his courage to come out.  He liked eating grass too, and was doing his rooster bit clucking and showing the hens nice things he'd found for them to eat, except that I think what he had mostly found was gravel.  He'll learn.

When we got the rooster he was the littlest of them all, and I wouldn't have known how to tell that he was a him, but the breeder assured me that he was a slightly paler shade of grey and that meant he was male.  He grew rapidly, and as a teenager would shove the hens aside when any treat like sultanas or bits of wet bread were put into the run.  Just in the past couple of months he has begun to behave like an adult rooster, and shows the hens where food is instead of eating all of it himself.  I think he found his day out tiring though, as he retired to his perch while the hens were all still fossicking about outside.

In the summer with the lighter evenings the chickens come home to roost later than in the winter, to the extent that if we're planning to go out in the evening then before letting the hens out we have to work out what time we'll need to go out, and whether that is after chicken bedtime.  We have to allow for the weather, as they go into their house earlier on dismal evenings than nice ones, and because it is not fun to commit yourself to two hours of chicken watching only for it to start raining, or the temperature to plummet.  Hens will stay out in quite a lot of rain, if they've got stuff to do, and until you've seen one you don't realise the graphic brilliance of the insult 'you look like a wet hen'.