K
EEPING a few garden chickens is great fun but it can be a bit of a soap opera. As a workfrom-home ex-townie who lives in rural Kent, I find the hens that share our garden are a welcome distraction. They’re pets rather than livestock and stay with us long after they’ve given up laying eggs. They have names and never end up on the dinner table.
Chickens are not deep thinkers but they’re great characters. Take Sarkozy the cockerel and his lady friend Carla, who live in a bijou loft apartment-style hutch halfway down our garden. They’re the result of our being given half a dozen eggs to incubate. We’ve known Sarkozy and Carla since they were a few minutes old.
They’re Polish crested bantams and look compact, neat and a bit showy, with head feathers that resemble little fireworks going off. In summer Sarkozy’s plumage has a “look at me girls” sheen, his tail feathers are a cascading flourish. He’s small, struts and is very keen on grooming, which is why we named him after the former French president with the built-up shoes and high maintenance wife.
Sarkozy thinks he’s hard and will sometimes charge my hand when I’m filling his drinker. When this happens, I grab hold of the bird, croon and tickle him under the chin. He can’t decide whether to be furious or enjoy the experience, and his little brain becomes so overloaded by this conflict that when I put him down again he scuttles away, cursing in fluent chicken and gives me a wide berth. He can’t deal with the love.
We also have a flock of big hens, who roam the garden and wander past Sarkozy and Carla’s run. When he’s feeling flirtatious Sarkozy engages in a sort of sideways tapdance to attract their attention. Mostly they ignore this display of avian manhood.
Chickens are very unreconstructed in their social habits and Sarkozy simply isn’t man enough for ours. When I tried to introduce them properly, his nerve failed and he hid behind the henhouse.
For female chickens the “pecking order” isn’t an abstract concept. There’s a hierarchy that works on age. You don’t need to be big and strong to be in charge of everyone else, you have to be the eldest, or the offspring of a senior hen, and you can move up the pecking order as newer birds arrive and the ones senior to you expire.
sOME chief chickens are feather-yanking bullies, others benign dictators. Our current boss hen, Slasher, fits that bill. She has a glacial Maggie Smith look which ensures that she’s always first in the queue at meal times.
Slasher is an infrequent layer of blue/green eggs that she likes to secrete under bushes. At 10 she’s very old but with her comb flopped over one eye like an artist’s beret and delicate plumage she’s strangely elegant. Her unusual name comes from the first time I picked her up. The bird emitted a terrible scream and attacked my hand with her beak. It didn’t hurt, but having referred to her as “a little slasher”, the name stuck.
Slasher is actually rather shy, so her occasional willingness these days to eat from my hand rather than try to savage it is the nearest thing to human/chicken bonding you’re likely to find.
As we’re fond of our chickens, when they get ill we take them to the vet, and this is usually expensive. One of our hens recently cost about £150 thanks to an avian sinus condition, something nasty called egg peritonitis, three trips to the vet and two lots of medication.
The animal in question is a stately matriarch called Priscilla, who began her life with us as a serial surrogate parent, hatching successive generations of chicks and ducklings. Not all chickens are natural parents but Priscilla is a feathery earth mother who clucked contentedly rather than had hysterics when her three-day-old foster ducklings plunged into a washing-up bowl for their first swim.
We knew Priscilla was in trouble when, after weeks of imprisonment thanks to the recent bird flu scare, she lost interest in food. After diagnosis she stoutly resisted daily beak-fulls of syringed medication, but has made a miraculous recovery (although my bank balance hasn’t) and now stomps into view with a hopeful “are you going to