THE CHICKEN DIARIES

Last night was a difficult night for the hen run. We had our annual cull - where we single out the superfluous cockerels and take them to be made 'oven ready'.  Not at all pleasant, but necessary.

Every year we raise some chickens - either in our incubator or, when we have a broody hen (there are always several) then she will sit on eggs. Some of the eggs are intended to be hatched - as are the Welsomer eggs we put into our incubator a couple of days ago - because we are wanting to strengthen the flock  in some way. Others are complete surprises - as when a hen who had disappeared from view three weeks previously suddenly pops up with a little clutch of fluffy infants beside her. Always, we end up with more cockerels that we can accommodate and can hardly ever find a home for them. If left in the hen run as adults they fight with each other, sexually assault some increasingly unhappy hens and the place becomes a bloodbath.

So they end up in the pot.

Yesterday evening at about 10pm, when all the hens were in their houses and asleep if not just sleepy, we went on our night time raid. We caught the four cockerels destined for the freezer and boxed them up ready to go to Mme Lasserre to be despatched and dressed this morning. We don't do it ourselves for two reasons. Firstly because we are a pair of wimps and it took us years before we were able to eat our own chickens let alone contemplate killing them and secondly because we would do it badly. I can now happily eat meat which we have raised but only if I am sure it has lived as natural and stress free life as possible and that it has been despatched quickly and cleanly (and by somebody else). So we leave it to the expert. All four are now as oven ready as you could wish for and are slowly solidifying in the deep freeze. Happily we never gave them names.

The other deed involved our Araucana hens - of whom there are also four. They are a remarkably flighty breed and will fly over the hen run fence into the orchard on a daily basis - and then find it impossible to get back in again, so they spend the whole day pressed against the wire netting with their cockerel and any araucanas who haven't gone over the wire that day pressing against the other side, trying to get as close to one another as possible. It is a tragic sight. Problem gets worse in the evening when they mysteriously can't fly back in again and so are either

a) chased round the garden by Richard until they find the entrance to the hen run by themselves
b) go and fly up a tree for the night or
c) move in with the Lavender Pekins who have hutches outside the hen run - whereupon their cockerel thinks it is Christmas and tries to leap on them in a fit of misplaced passion.

So to avoid any or all of these scenarios we clip one wing on each bird. Easily done last night and then the trimmed chickens were put back into their hen house to sleep the ordeal off.

Today, sometime late morning, one of them is out of the hen run again. How she has done it we don't know. Maybe she has learned to fly round in circles.