The Good Life Greg Dixon
Rural folk wanting a quiet life are well advised to treat all chooks equally.
Ihave seen the face of chaos, and let’s just say it’s covered in feathers and has a little red comb. It’s been three weeks since Joanna, Jacinda, Catherine and Little Linda — our four wyandotte hens — moved in, and in that short time our world and quite a bit of the garden have been turned upside down.
When once tranquillity reigned, the hot afternoon peace is now broken by the bellowing of dark oaths and dreadful threats: “I see you in the garden! Right, that’s it — you’re going in the bloody pot!”
Where once there was an Eden filled with lush ground cover, delicate ferns and fragrant nicotiana, there is now the Somme, a broken landscape of churned soil and heartbreaking destruction.
And when one might once have taken the late, albeit piping hot, afternoon air and perhaps stood in the shade to watch the fantails play in the birdbath under the honey locust tree, there is now the wild fear of suddenly being surrounded by clucking, demanding chooks and having to leg it for the house.
“I don’t think they’re like birds at all,” said Michele, a few days after we decided to let them free-range all day. “I think they’re like those things that chase the kids in Jurassic Park.”
“What, velociraptors?”
“Exactly,” she said, locking the door and pulling the curtain.
Actually, despite the chaos, despite the sense we’re being stalked by tiny, rapacious dinosaurs, despite their having to be chased repeatedly from the more sensitive bits of the garden, our new chooks — the Riot Girls, I call them — are jolly good fun.
It is an old-fashioned delight to walk around a corner in the garden and find one eating a wind- fallen plum. It makes me smile each evening when, with the sunset, they take themselves back to their run and trot up the little ramp and into the coop where, with lots of mysterious thumping and banging, they arrange themselves, in strict pecking order, on the perches.
I feed them a little dried apple each afternoon — Joanna and Jacinda take it straight from my fingers — and I cannot deny the childlike thrill that comes from watching them come running when I announce treat time with the call “choooook-chook-chook-chook!” And then there is the orchestral carry-on from all of them when one lays an egg, something like a Wyandotte Symphony in Gee-We’re-Clever Major.
But the thing you have to know about chickens, the thing I have learnt to fear these past weeks, is that they each suffer from a dreadful, possibly pathological fear of missing out.
Liz, the wyandotte lady who sold us our hens, warned us: “Chickens are terrible liars.” But they are worse green-eyed monsters. If one is getting something, they all must get something because, let me tell you, hell hath no fury like a chicken spurned.
Even when there is no food in the offing, they seem to suspect that someone somewhere is getting something that they aren’t — and they have plenty to say about it.
“Do you know anyone who speaks chicken?” I asked Michele the other morning.
She — ever keen to appear the sagacious naturalist — pointed to herself, and waited.
“Well,” I said, “young Catherine and I were standing together in the morning sun. She was pecking away at the grass and I was chatting away to her, and then all of a sudden, grrrrr, she damn well growled at me.”
“Oh,” said Michele after a pause, “well if she’s anything like her namesake at that age, she’s probably a bit hung over.”
Or, I thought to myself, she’s bloody Attila the hen with a bad case of FOMO.
Let me tell you, hell hath no fury like a chicken spurned.