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.