I am either completely enjoying everything new about our life here, including the chickens, or I am just easily amused. Our chickens are now free to roam about the yard during the day, picking at bugs and scratching. We do need to prop the hen-house door ajar, so if our winds blow and bang the door, none of the flock get smashed into chicken nuggets. I had no idea, that roosters were not born knowing how to crow. The Lionels our Cuckoo-Maran roosters are the best looking of our flock, so far, but they are not, however, the best ‘sounding’. The Lionels have begun to practice their crowing technique and so far none of them have ‘it’. They sound like a cat getting stepped on. Happily for us, the hen-house is very far away from our bedroom window.
We do not have a garbage disposal, so everything goes into a ‘chicken pail’. In the evening we take the pail out to the chickens, after first ‘calling’ them. Calling chickens is apparently a fine art and we too are still in our training stage. I’m sorry for you that it is not possible to learn chicken calling over the internet. It sounds a bit like, “Here chuck, chuck, chuck”. But as this particular call has been handed down over the generations in England by my loving spouse’s family, it does include an accent and it is taking a long time for we novices to get it ‘just right’. We are told, however, to just ‘wait until my sister shows up from England and you ask her how to call the chickens’, my hope is that by then we’ve got ‘it’. Once the chickens have been ‘called’ (correctly or not) we toss the garbage, I mean ‘treats’ about the hen yard for them to gobble down. Our chickens are a bit ‘slow’ and have yet to realize that this is food we’re tossing about, not fire and they do not need to run about like their head has been cut off. (Although we do not say that around the chickens, as running with their head cut off is a delicate subject). Once the chickens clue into the fact that there is fresh food about, half of them start eating it, the other half only want what the others are eating and usually one small chicken runs around the yard with a piece of food in their mouth doing nothing but running until one of the bigger hens steals the snack from its beak.
Our hens should start laying eggs in about 2 more months, so we’ve upgraded their chicken meal to ‘laying meal’. I don’t know what is in it, but the kittens also like it. Yesterday, while the hens were out and about the kittens came in for a little ‘laying meal’. (I don’t know what laying meal will do for their mouse catching abilities, but hopefully not slow it down, as we haven’t seen a mouse in weeks.) The kittens in the hen yard went well until the flock came back. There was a lot of ‘clucking’, but most of our chickens are challenged intelligently and bravery is not high in their gene pool either. One hen finally decided that the kittens did indeed need to know that they were not in the right yard and gave Tigger a couple of pecks at which time, I scooped them up and took them out of the chicken yard.
No, this does not make me a ‘cat person’, it just makes me compassionate, plus I am enjoying our mouse-free state.
