gone on her holidays*

When I slid the door of the chicken house open this morning only one hen came out.  That wasn't normal.  Usually they all come tumbling out one after another, eager for their sprinkle of porridge oats with sultanas.  I could see another through the window, bouncing up and down on the roosting board.  I thought there must be something down on the floor she was afraid of, and wondered if a rat had got in, but when I opened the big door at the end of the house to have a look one of the hens was lying dead, face down on the floor.

It was the one with the funny tuft of feathers on her neck, and I wasn't completely surprised.  She's been reluctant to flock with the others for a few days when the Systems Administrator has let them out, preferring to hang about near the hen house instead of going to scratch around under the Eleagnus hedge, and retiring early to bed.  She used to be an adventurous creature, the one that once got locked out of the run all night by mistake because she was very late returning to the chicken house and we lost count and thought they were all inside.  She has been less venturesome for a while.  We wondered if perhaps she'd had a fright out in the garden, but evidently she was ailing.

The body was lying near the chicken house entrance, but not blocking it, so the other two hens could have got out into the run if they'd wanted to.  I thought it showed more sensibility than you might expect from chickens that they didn't like to pass that close to their late companion's corpse, and appeared agitated by the death, or the body.  On that basis keeping hens in sheds in huge flocks where the farm workers routinely have to go around each morning picking up the bodies is even worse than it would be anyway.

So we are down to three hens.  Three is OK, but if we lose any more we'll have to think about getting a couple of new ones.  We couldn't risk ending up with just one on her own.  They are social animals, and it would be very cruel.  I don't know how on that basis we ever stop when we decide to give up poultry keeping, unless a mass fox catastrophe proved the catalyst, which is how quite a lot of people end up stopping.  Give the sole survivor to a hen keeping friend, I suppose, and not ask too many questions about what they would do with her.  We are basically escaped townies with a taste for gardening, and leave all our hens to live out their natural span until infirmity or the fox get them, long beyond their productive egg years, but true country dwellers are not so indulgent.

Poor old hen.  Still, she had a pretty good life as hens go, and she was mourned by her companions, at least briefly.

*If you don't get the reference, re-watch Chicken Run, which is in any case a work of genius.