Fowl play

The stench of death hangs heavy over chez Jones as I write this missive. A dastardly deed was committed last night and the culprit left naught but a few feathers and twelve tiny chickens huddled in fear.

Yes, nature in all its tooth and claw has visited us and taken, murdered no less , one of our four-week old chicks. And they had only been in the outdoor pen for a day! This livestock husbandry is turning out to be a fraught affair.

Imagine our innocent joy when 15 yellow balls of day-old chick were delivered into our arms (or rather into an old bathtub that sits in my tackle room). The sight of them brought back memories of childhood past. Of me with brother and sister, Mum and Dad, chasing first chicks, then ducklings, and eventually even goslings around our back garden in Blighty.

Now with our own little boy to delight, and a gaping hole in the chest freezer to fill, we jumped at the chance to rear our own meat birds. No one told us of the horrors we were, and still are, enduring; and we have weeks to go until ‘processing’ day!

A mere 24 hours after their arrival, we noticed one little chick looking sickly. You could tell because the colour had completely drained from his face; that, and the fact he lay in a corner panting slightly and not eating. He passed quietly away in the night. Oh well, one down 14 left. Little Z will never notice, we thought.

A couple of days later, while son and I fed and watered our brood, one chick convulsed, squawked, twitched, squawked again and fell dead. A chicken heart attack, I guess. “Chicken sleeping, Daddy?” enquired Z. “Erm, yes,” I lied, instantly riddled with guilt.

And then there’s Wonky. Named as such due to what I can only imagine was the chicken version of a stroke; he was left unable to stand, one leg splayed awkwardly to the side and with a useless wing. Did we put him out of his misery? Of course not.

Wonky now resides in his own private room. He has a cardboard box lined with straw, his own water and food bowls. And, because he squawked in anguish at being separated from the flock, Wonky’s box has windows cut into the sides, a panoramic view no less, so that he can see and commune with his chicken brethren.

This catalogue of death and injury has been quite hard on us to date, and now that the chicks are old enough to go outside we have to contend with the local wildlife, too?

I say this sounding innocent to the point of dumb to many of you I’m sure and when I think back to my childhood I should have expected as much. I mentioned that we had chickens, ducks and geese at my family home. Well, we did and we graduated from one fowl variety to another not because of culinary preference, nor expansion of the smallholding. No, my Mum liked having these birds around and so did the resident foxes.

Quite regularly, on returning from letting the birds out in early morning or putting them in at dusk, Mum would have a tear in her eye. We grew to recognise her maudlin nature and not ask what was wrong but how many had gone.

Yes, we kept chickens et al to feed the wildlife. Murder at the bottom of the garden was a regular occurrence. We even came to accept it as part of the natural order. So, I guess I have to go out to my Canadian brood, reinforce the fences and suck it up.

Why do this, though? Because I like a chicken dinner, and even if I do contribute to a coyote’s larder once in a while, I’ll keep on doing it because that’s what my Mum does.