Re: Sick Black Rock

Jill wrote:
A_ L _P wrote:
Jill wrote:
Steve Newport wrote:
I think on this value of chickens question there is also another
angle - the British loive of pets. I think a lot of families buying
their bird treat them as pets not food producers.

It is now both -- they are interested in having food from a source
they can monitor and clearly most other food animals are impractical
! There is an equal upsurgence in vegetable growing.

But its not confined to the UK, from all the years we have been
online, its clear that there is a similar growing movement in other
places, including the US and Australia, just not as far on. Maybe in
the US the credit crunch has hit a lot harder.

And then there are the "sensible, practical" people with a small flock
specifically for sensible, practical reasons, who develop an
irrational fondness for one chook who escapes the cull of the
underproductive birds this year... and next year... and against all
common sense ceases to be a stock unit and becomes a member of the
family. Charm can take a chicken a long way!


What's her name?


*One* of the ones I'm thinking of never did have a name, but she'd had the gumption to make a break for it and fly down the orchard when the cull was taking place. Came back later when the fuss (and her sisters) had died. She was mostly "You!" said in fond tone with a shake of the head as she tottered her way into antiquity. Eventually of her own accord she turned up her toes and made like a dead parrot only paler.

Then there was Lily, given to me when I was a child by the woman next door. She was the blight of my parents' lives, ended up in a retirement pen of her own because she found the young ones too noisy and disrespectful. But could they lay a finger on one feather of her disobliging head? Could they 'eck as like! And she was a disobliging hen from the beginning. When I was older and Mrs Sutherland had moved away long ago they mentioned that she must have been a helluva old chook because Mrs Suthie was too miserable to give away a bird that still laid or was fit to boil. Nonetheless Lily lived on and on, laying an occasional egg in the early years but then quitting so as to enjoy her retirement. On and on and on, inconvenient all the way while day old chicks got raised or, in later years because though it cost more up-front it was less bother, point-of-lay pullets bought, the 2 year olds got gradually killed off, the remainder swapped quarters with pullets and moved into the smaller house.

At that time one of the houses was an A-frame house + run which was supposed to be moved around but it weighed SO much that while a good idea it just didn't work with just Mum'n'Dad power. That was when Father built the final big chook house, the wholly enclosed deep litter one with a huge chicken-netting front window with a perch just inside so they could stand and look out at the world. There was discussion about the procedure, the night-time grabbing of chook after chook, swapping these to here, t'others to the other house, and so on, this to occur the next day. And what of Lily, who was across the road on the post-Sutherlands neighbours' paddock in her individual apartment along with the older ones in another house and run.

Well, that was when Lily performed her first and only - and last - cooperative act: she died. We found her in the morning still and scrawny, a "white hen with black feathers" as one of my mother's friends called the Leghorn X Australorp chooks that were common at the time.

I try to avoid naming them. It doesn't prevent attachment but I think it serves not to encourage it. Having mixed breed birds where "mixed" is a gene-whirl-pool, there are so many individuals. So many one can identify at a glance, so few without some odd or endearing characteristic.

A L P
.

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