Chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken, lay a little egg for me.........

Living here surrounded by wandering livestock made me think that it was about time we had a few chickens here on the croft.

I have never kept chickens before and the nearest I've been to keeping chickens is sharing an office with someone who brought me delicious fresh eggs and funny anecdotes about her chickens Vera & Vera's Mate.

A chance sighting of an advert on Facebook spurred me on to putting a couple of cardboard boxes in the boot of the car and scuttling over to Stornoway to meet a woman who was rehoming some of her 100 Rhode Island Reds. My first ever encounter with a chicken was chasing this bemused flock around an enclosure until I managed to grab a few by the tail and stuff them in my box in the boot.

My preparations for keeping chickens consisted of making sure I had a large enough cardboard box to transport them in, probably not the best of planning but they arrived back home safely enough and jumped out of the box and strutted indignantly around each other and around the garden. 

I had decided that my four new chickens could use the smallest room in the blackhouse as their den as someone had already cut a perfectly hen-shaped hole out of the corner of the door already for them to wander backwards and forwards from the garden. I put a couple of damaged bedside tables on their side against the wall, stuffed them with sawdust and propped the doors open on a couple of bricks. I made a perch from an old fence post and jammed it firmly in a former window alcove and covered the floor with straw and then let them get on with it.

Perching and posing

After 2 days I found 4 eggs. and for over a fortnight I had four eggs every morning. This was going to be dead easy.

But then for days and days all I could find was one egg in the back of one of the upturned bedside cabinets. 

One evening The Dog went wandering around the garden and came to an very excited halt in the corner beside the five-bar gate. He suddenly turned on all the charms of a properly trained gun dog, which is what cocker spaniels are supposed to be. He wagged, and stood on three legs and turned and looked and wagged a bit more and stared and pointed with his raised paw. Surely enough, in a clump of reeds was a perfectly turned nesting place with over a dozen eggs in. A further egg hunt proved to be fruitful with three other nests in among the reeds in the corners of the garden all with a fine clutch of eggs.

Real Free Range

After 3 months of keeping chickens I'm still unable to see anything like a pecking order. They all seem to be equally polite and greedy in similar proportions and don;t appear to have a leader or a subordinate. Maybe I'm not looking at them at the right time but I haven't observed any kind of hierarchical pecking order at any time, except when it involves The Dog. 

The Dog is definitely of the lowest order. After successfully herding, cornering and catching the neighbours Black Rocks and dumping them on our sofa these four are the doyennes of doggiedom! They run circles around him and witter away each other about how indignant they are about him. 

They are really cheeky. After dominating The Dog they've tried to do it with us by coming into the house at every opportunity and brushing passed us when we try to confront and catch them to chase them back down the hall. At one point they shoved The Dog out of the way and encircled his feeding bowl and sat there like one of those wooden hand-held toys pecking away at his Pedigree Chum or whatever dog food it was that was on offer that week.

Cheeky Cluckers!

Keeping chickens is dead easy. They all seemed to be doing really well until one day when I went to collect the eggs and found one of them dead next to her chum in the same nesting box. As I removed her body the other chicken started calling and clucking and kept it up for nearly 10 minutes. It was really sad.

Still, the other three all seem healthy enough and we're getting three eggs a day which we swap for mackerel and other delights that the neighbours have got that we may need.

And who knows.....maybe I could pluck their feathers to stuff my cushions, which is another story.

Take The Weather With You........

The longer I am here the more I like being here. Every day I wake up and can't wait to look through the window to see what kind of day greets me. I even look through the window in the dead of night just in case something interesting is happening in the sky. I keep waiting for the time when I look into the night sky and quote the line from Local Hero when McIntyre says "It's amazing. I wish you could see it! I wish I could describe it to you like I'm seeing it!"

We've had reports about the northern lights and one night we stared at the sky for ages watching a weird pattern waving and dancing around. It wasn't as colourful or as startling as everyone tells us the northern lights are but it was definitely a strange and wonderful glow stretching and wavering around and across the horizon. The following day we saw photographs of a glorious light show of aurora borealis from the same part of the sky as we had been watching, we just hadn't stayed up til after 2am to watch them growing more and more colourful.

The lights I didn't see on 30th August
58º Degrees North Photography managed it, though!

We have plenty of time to see them I'm sure and in the meantime I shall just peak through the blackout curtains at 2am to see what I can see stretching out over the Atlantic.

I have never seen The Milky Way looking as milky and three dimensional as I have from the croft - even with our street lighting!! Yes, we have street lighting. I keep threatening to ping the bulb right outside the house with a catapult so that I can see the night sky without a neon light glow polluting the darkness. They go off shortly after midnight so I have managed to be a sky and star gazer a few times, few being the operative word. There are very few clear, cloudless nights but when they come BAM! it's a visual overload with the constellations looking as if they've been specially picked out and given an extra polish to be extra shiny and clear. We're so fortunate to be able to experience it.

And, like all the other islanders, I'm becoming obsessed with the weather. This is a totally pointless exercise as the weather never ever does what you think it's going to. It never does what the Met Office tells us it's going to do. The weather can only be predicted if you talk about yesterday's weather.Everyone knows what yesterday's weather was like and in case you missed it you will be told what it was like. You will also be told that they knew what it was going to be like. 

Watching the storm through the kitchen window

The yardarm has now passed the equinox and the nights have stopped creeping in slowly and surreptitiously and they now land with a bang when you're not expecting it. One minute you're washing the dishes and counting the Greylag Geese in the croft and the next minute the deep navy blue sky has encased your view and reminded you how close to winter the islands are. And the clocks haven't even gone back yet! It will be dark by 6pm in a few weeks time.

How will I deal with days and days of back to back dismal weather and dark and dreary nights? Probably by being completely overwhelmed by the beauty of the sunshiny light whenever it appears, no matter how briefly. Only last week the wind dropped in the exact same proportions that the sun shone. We had the brightest turquoise skies, the whitest, whispiest clouds and the breathtaking site of a magnificent sea eagle spiraling upwards in a thermal above the croft. I've never seen such a fine example of why it's called the white-tailed sea eagle. All from my front doorstep when I was bringing the bins in!

No eagles but clouds of whispiest white in a blue October sky.

I'm very lucky and feel exhilarated every single day by something I see or something I hear. It was definitely  A Good Day the day the decision to move here was made.