A tale of chickens and poo.

In addition to the five chicks that we successfully hatched ourselves (see hatching our dinner), we were recently offered some six-week old male chickens from a work colleague who had also hatched chickens but was only interested in the ladies.  She was going to dispatch the men, unless we wanted them instead?  Of course we did!  At this point our chicks were still scraps of fluff scuttling around inside a brooder box so we were completely unprepared for dealing with seven ‘teenage’ boys, as were our neighbours! 

That weekend was warm, and even though we drove the chickens home with the air conditioning on full blast, they were showing definite signs of overheating.  When we lifted them out of the cardboard boxes they simply flopped down on the ground looking slightly dazed and panting, or, more alarmingly, lay stretched out on the patio. 

A sweaty chicken

After a few minutes in the cool of the garden, the chickens gradually recovered and started looking more alert.  We had surrounded them with a ring of water containers but the chickens simply huddled together in the centre watching us warily. 

 

Already feeling guilty at this point, we then made a major error.  We knew that these chickens had not really been handled and so assumed that our presence was causing them additional distress in an already confused and unfamiliar period of their lives.  We decided that it would be better for myself and Ian to go inside, leaving the chickens to discover the garden at their leisure.  As we got up leave, followed as usual by Tiberius and Sibelius who had wandered over to be nosey, the chickens panicked, and flapped, and ... flew.  Ah yes, we had forgotten about the whole ‘flying’ thing.  We had previously spent several years living with Indian Runner ducks, some of the least aerodynamic birds in existence, and somehow chickens had been slotted in alongside them as things that could fly in theory but generally won’t.

 

And of course for adult chickens this is generally true.  Adults have large bodies in comparison to their wing span and it takes a lot of effort to become airborne.  They might flap up onto a low branch but sustained flight is rare.  However, adolescent chickens like ours have pretty much adult-sized wings but only one third of their adult body weight.  For them, flying is much easier.

And so it was that we watched the smallest chicken, a little white one, disappear over the fence into next door’s garden. 

Our neighbours have been very tolerant of our growing menagerie, and we’ve always done our best to keep the quacking/chirping/bleating down to acceptable levels (i.e. none), particularly on a Sunday morning.   Back in our runner duck years we often resorted to bringing Sandi Toksvig (the duck not the human) into the kitchen for the night because she developed a habit of quacking loudly whenever it rained; presumably broadcasting the availability of insects.  Unfortunately her delight at finding worms at 4am was not shared by our neighbours and once inside our house, her furious quacking for release meant that we spent the remainder of the night with our heads under pillows. 

More recently, when the ducks were replaced by goats, our garden has become something of a petting zoo, particularly during half-term, and we hope that this goes some way to alleviating the occasional bouts of noise.  Unfortunately our adjacent neighbours do not have children, and therefore we were slightly concerned at their reaction to finding out we had added yet another species to our garden.

We fixed our brightest smiles and knocked on the door.  Hello!  We're really sorry but one of our chickens has just flown into your garden.  The beginnings of an answering smile became a rictus grin.  You have chickens?  Yes we did. We apologised, and explained they would be no trouble at all, apart from the current trouble, in fact we were planning on eating them, so could we come and rescue our chicken from your garden?    You’re going to eat it?  Well not right now obviously.  At this point I felt our neighbour was imagining a scene from a horror film as we chased chickens around the garden with our log splitter.  I  quickly launched into my explanation of our welfare aims.  Really we just wanted to give these cockerels a few additional months of a full and happy life than they would otherwise have had.  Unfortunately as our neighbour helped us chase a panicked chicken around their garden, I felt that we were not being the best advert for our welfare project. However, he seemed satisfied with the knowledge that we were going to dispatch the cockerels as soon as they showed signs of beginning to crow.

We returned our errant chicken to his brood and carefully clipped all their wings.  Actually, here we dispatched our one piece of chicken knowledge and removed the flight feathers from just one wing of each chicken. Clipping both wings means that the chicken can still fly, given sufficient effort and incentive, but clipping just one wing means that the chicken is off-balance and will simply spiral back down to earth (I can’t remember where I read this, but it works).

The next morning we propped open the door of the chicken house (a converted rabbit hutch), so that our newest arrivals could spend the day exploring the garden, and went to work.   

 

I was first to return. 

 

The garden was covered in poo.  Lots and lots of puddles of poo.  Large ones.

 

I was shocked, how could such small chickens be responsible for producing such large volumes of waste?  As I shuffled round the patio with a dustpan, brush and watering can, sweeping up and brushing off as best as I could, I worried about the effect that this would have on the other residents of our garden.  I seemed deeply unfair to let Tiberius, Sibelius and Charles out onto grass that was so liberally covered in drippy muck, yet keeping the chickens inside their house all day did not fit in at all with our welfare aims.  

At this point I noticed two things: the first was that Sibelius had disappeared up the ramp inside the chicken house, and the second was that as Tiberius was following me around he was leaving large drippy pools of diarrhoea.  Ah.  So here was an explanation for the poonami.  It turned out that the goats had spent the day happily eating all of the chicken food and quite a lot of chicken poo, and were now feeling the after effects.

 

We now lock the door of the chicken house as soon as the chickens are out in the morning, much to the disgust of Tiberius and Sibelius, whose sole objective in life is now to gain entry to the chicken house.

 

Spot the chickens...