Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance E-Book

Martin Gurdon

• Herausgeber: CompanionHouse Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 187

Beschreibung

Owning chickens is fast becoming the latest in metropolitan chic. If you can't own them, you'll still want to read about them. Primal urges, the quest for ultimate power, sex, death, gender bending, and huge vet bills—these are the things that chickens are made of. Martin Gurdon's hilarious Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance relives the highs and lows of chicken ownership. This unique chicken memoir follows the Gurdon family through the ups and downs of a wonderful hobby. In addition to providing eggs, the hens offer distractions from everyday life. You'll meet a cast of unusual characters, from the frightening disciplinary measures of Bossy Chicken, and the maternal instincts of Psycho Chicken, to the bizarre tales of Mike the headless chicken from Colorado, and the physical rehabilitation and sexual transformation of Yvette. The relationship between bird and human is by turns heartwarming and bewildering, but always entertaining. In fact, readers might even learn a thing or two about raising chickens in this lively book. Inside Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance, Updated Second Edition Hilarious account of a rookie poultry-owner's experience raising birds in his backyard. James Herriot meets Bill Bryson in this wryly amusing memoir of one man's relationship with his chickens. Chronicles the daily life of a chicken, including dust baths, brutal pecking-order rituals, gender-bending encounters, and for its owner the possibility of huge vet bills. Updated second edition features new photographs and a new chapter. A must for chicken lovers and a must for anyone with a quirky sense of humor. Beyond the laughs there are even some practical lessons to be learnt about what not to do when keeping chickens!

Leseprobe

Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance

CompanionHouse Books™ is an imprint of Fox Chapel Publishers International Ltd.

Project Team

Vice President-Content: Christopher Reggio

Editor: Amy Deputato

Copy Editor: Laura Taylor

Design: Mary Ann Kahn

Index: Elizabeth Walker

Copyright © 2018 by IMM Lifestyle Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Fox Chapel Publishers, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

Print ISBN 978-1-62008-276-8

eBook ISBN 978-1-62008-277-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gurdon, Martin, author.

Title: Hen and the art of chicken maintenance : reflections on a life of

raising chickens / by Martin Gurdon.

Description: Mount Joy, PA : Fox Chapel Publishing, [2018] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018005413 (print) | LCCN 2018007157 (ebook) | ISBN

9781620082775 () | ISBN 9781620082768 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Chickens--Anecdotes.

Classification: LCC SF487.3 (ebook) | LCC SF487.3 .G87 2018 (print) | DDC

636.5--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005413

This book has been published with the intent to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter within. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the author and publisher expressly disclaim any responsibility for any errors, omissions, or adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein. The techniques and suggestions are used at the reader’s discretion and are not to be considered a substitute for veterinary care. If you suspect a medical problem, consult your veterinarian.

Fox Chapel Publishing

903 Square Street

Mount Joy, PA 17552

Fox Chapel Publishers International Ltd.

7 Danefield Road, Selsey (Chichester)

West Sussex PO20 9DA, U.K.

We are always looking for talented authors. To submit an idea, please send a brief inquiry to [email protected]

Contents

Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance

1: The Hows and Whys

2: Preparation

3: First Flock

4: Hens at Home

5: The Bird That Turned

6: Lost and Found

7: Mike, the Headless Chicken

8: In Sickness and in Health

9: Confused of Kent

10: The Boys

11: The Birds

12: Eggs and a Potted History

13: Mrs. Brown

14: What Happened Next?

15: Wonky and Company

16: Old and New

About the Author

Dedicated to the memory of George Bishop, who didn’t know about chickens but knew about words.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to David, Jenny, and Jane for the encouragement, observations, help, and positive bullying.

1: The Hows and Whys

The Business End

“Would you mind holding the chicken?” asked the expat Australian vet as he snapped on the rubber glove.

I picked up Edith, the bird with the defective bottom, in such a way that her wings were clamped tightly to her sides as the vet inserted a strategic index finger. I’d never heard a chicken make the noise that she made, but my every sympathy was with her.

Edith was a hybrid bird. A standard-issue, broad-beamed, egg-laying matron with a rolling gait, an endless appetite for worms, and a certain dignity, which her current predicament was undermining.

“Hmmmm,” said the vet.

Edith gave me a baleful “things-couldn’t-get-any-worse” look. Then my cell phone rang, its glissando, synthetic trill echoing round the bare-walled examination room.

“Would you like to get that?” asked the vet. Had there not been a chicken between us, he would have been pointing at me.

I had a strong, tasteless vision of letting go and seeing the sickly Edith pivot and end up with her scaly legs waving in the air, or the vet yowling in agony as the weight of his avian patient broke his finger.

“It’s all right. The phone’s on ring back,” I said. Thankfully, the vet did not pick up on this unintended double entendre.

Afterward, I paid for what was a slightly inconclusive consultation. I wondered, not for the first time, at the turn of events that had led to my days regularly being filled with events like this.

Softening Up

Having a few hens in the backyard was supposed to be a bit of fun—a mild distraction—but was fast becoming a life-changing experience. It had started with an apparently innocent remark from my wife, Jane.

“You’d like to keep chickens again, wouldn’t you?” she’d said.

This wasn’t the first time she’d uttered these words, and I began to suspect an agenda. Jane has a knack of insinuating things into our lives by stealth. She’ll offer a vague-sounding thought on a vacation destination, the replacement of a piece of furniture, or the state of my shoes. It will take four or five repetitions of the “vague” idea for it to percolate into my brain and for me to realize that there’s nothing vague about it at all. A softening-up process has been taking place.

I hadn’t kept chickens since I was ten, and a good quarter of a century had elapsed since. I’d spent my formative years in suburban Kew, southwest London, which was not a place noted for its livestock. When my mother became ill, I was packed off to live with an aunt and uncle in Lancashire. My relatives must have been feeling indulgent, or possibly slightly deranged, when they agreed to let their nephew have some birds—on the conditions that they didn’t roam the yard and pillage the vegetable garden, lawn, and flower beds, and that I wasn’t to have a cockerel because of the noise.

As it happened, the chickens escaped all the time, pecked holes in vegetables, murdered plants, and excreted lustily all over my aunt and uncle’s lawn, leaving little brown patches of dead and withered grass. One hen ended up nesting under a rather nice shrub, where she raised a litter of chicks—indicating that the cockerel ban had not been successful, either.

Early Learning

My original flock had been a motley crew of limping, bare-bottomed, ex-battery burnout cases and the odd (sometimes very odd) bantam, bought with money I’d earned by collecting eggs at the local battery farm (this was the 1970s) from which my most exhausted birds had come.

Used to existing in very small cages in very warm sheds, these hens found the adjustment to relative freedom and much cooler temperatures difficult to take. I initially had three. Of the two scruffiest, dirtiest senior citizens, one expired on the first night, and the other lasted barely a week. The third, a stout off-white authority figure who’d unwisely retired from egg-laying, was made of sterner stuff.

The battery farm had referred to her as a “cull.” I handed over 20 pence, hoisted her from a crate of hens earmarked for a soup manufacturer, and called her Ethel. Decades later, I have only vague recollections of most of the birds I owned at the time, but I have quite distinct memories of her.

The same applies to Fred, the cockerel. He was a multicolored, one-eyed troubadour who liked a wild time and was prepared to travel to get it. He was a jungle fowl, which meant he had extravagantly curling tail feathers and plumage that was a mass of golds and greens. Fred was as showy as a Prussian general’s hat; a male bimbo with spurs.

He’d escaped from another farm or chicken breeder and taken up residence at the battery farm, where he’d grown sleek on a plentiful supply of layer’s mash. He’d spent his leisure time seeking out and seducing the occasional battery escapee. Fred had successfully avoided being caught by the farmer’s two stocky teenage sons, who would clomp uselessly after him, bellowing, “I’ll kill that! I’ll wring its neck!” Fred was a fast fowl.

Jungle fowl are vividly colored.

I kept seeing Fred out of the corner of my eye, as a flash of color in the far reaches of a shed or vanishing around the side of a barn. I began thinking covetous thoughts about cockerel ownership and wheedled away at my aunt and uncle about what an attractive bird he was. Quite why they relented is a mystery; perhaps there was some negotiation about tucking my shirt into my underpants (my aunt was pro, and I was anti), or maybe they thought I’d never catch him.

It took weeks, but I managed it, and he proved to be totally bonkers, battering me with his powerful wings, slashing with his spurs, and pecking viciously. It hurt, but I hung on.

The farmer, a man of infinite patience, let me put Fred in a battery cage with the aged broilers I’d acquired as his girlfriends. He even kept a straight face when I added some grass cuttings to the cage to remind the rampant Fred of the great outdoors. After moving Fred into his luxury residence (a sort of hovel made of old bricks and corrugated iron surrounded by a wobbly wire fence), he was able to experience the real outdoors.

As my chicken-keeping experience improved, so did the quality and longevity of Fred’s ladies. He became less manic and would even feed out of my hand, but he would not curb his wandering ways.

Fred’s early-morning routine involved eating, fornicating furiously, and then flying over the fence and scuttling off to the house down the lane, where the free-range chickens were given breakfast later in the morning. Here, he would have seconds, wink at various female members of their flock, and engage in further amorous activity before hotfooting it back in time for tea with us, some postprandial sex, and then bed.

I thought this was rather enterprising, but there were complaints, especially as summer—and with it, Fred’s love children—arrived.

“Can’t you do something about that randy chicken?” asked our exasperated neighbor, who didn’t want her flock to get any bigger and did not view the plague of small Freds and Fredas that were now running about her property with any pleasure.

I tried doubling the height of the fence, which proved no obstacle to Fred, so I took a large pair of kitchen scissors and clipped his wings. This didn’t hurt him, although because he was now somewhat crinkle-cut around the edges, it might have damaged his ego a bit. However, it was entirely useless, because I did not realize that I should have clipped only one wing, not both, to unbalance the bird and prevent unwanted takeoffs. Fred just flapped the resultant stumps harder, kept escaping, and carried on as before.

As the flock of love children increased, the neighbor gave up complaining and eventually developed a grudging admiration for her exotic-looking visitor.

Fred had surprisingly good street sense for a chicken. When I banged the food dish, he’d hurtle, roadrunner-like, along the side of the road to get his fill. But having one eye didn’t help, and he was eventually hit by a car.

As I scraped his mortal remains from the road, I was sad but also seized by a certain cold-eyed pragmatism of which ten-year-olds are capable when viewing death. This was something that happened to grandparents, with their parchment skin, and to chickens who didn’t look where they were going. It was remote and frightening but rather interesting, too.

Fred II and Ethel

I reasoned that Fred had been struck down while doing his own thing. And, anyway, he’d produced a successor: a youthful, slim-hipped version of himself who lacked the urge to travel. With staggering originality, I christened this bird Fred II. One of the disadvantages of being more sylph-like was a certain frustration in the bonking department when making the intimate acquaintance of big-hipped birds like Ethel. Consummation required Fred II to become an avian contortionist, with a look of pained concentration and then frustration when he fell off, which was a regular happening. Nature is a wonderful thing, however, and Fred II persevered.

Had Ethel been human, she would have worn tweeds, had blue-rinsed hair, and been a fan of blood sports. She was a control freak who would stomp around the run, letting everyone else know that their place in life’s pecking order was to be pecked. Egg-laying appeared to be something she rarely endured—it got in the way of eating or yanking the feathers out of somebody else’s neck.

Ethel became ill after I introduced a very pretty black bantam that the other hens turned on and chased away—and with good reason. This bird was diseased, and by the time she died, a number of the others were starting to keel over. When the indomitable Ethel began to look off-color, I decided to take her to the vet, which was a five-mile bike ride away. It didn’t occur to me to ask my aunt or uncle for a lift. Getting a chicken into the saddlebag of my cousin’s old bicycle took some maneuvering, but eventually I got her strapped down, with her head and neck protruding. Hens have fixed expressions, but somehow their faces let you know when they’re nonplussed.

I don’t suppose the trip did Ethel much good. I didn’t have an appointment, and I didn’t have any money, but the vet saw me anyway. He handed over some yellow pills, and I pedaled home again.

Ethel was not a good patient. She spat out the medication and, despite my best efforts, the bug got her in the end. So, when she finally succumbed, I dug a hole for her and began to consider a suitable replacement, little realizing that this cycle of events would become a regular feature of my adult life.

Battery Casualty

There were exceptions to my passive childish callousness, like the crippled hen whose name I’ve long since forgotten. She also came from the battery farm and was the sort of bird that, by then, I’d learned to avoid. She was another sad little retiree with a skinny frame. There was plenty of loose pink skin on display because she’d given up growing feathers on large areas of her body, and she couldn’t walk. In fact, she couldn’t stand up. The battery cages had sloping floors, tapered at the ends to allow the eggs to roll out and be collected. Some birds tried to wriggle through this mail-slot-sized gap and would get trapped, cutting off the circulation to their legs. It was usually a death sentence.

This chicken was an obvious basket case, but I decided to take her on. It was winter when I took her home, and I half expected that she wouldn’t survive the night, but I found her reclining on her straw bed the next morning, blinking and looking surprisingly perky. Her disability meant she had to be fed and watered inside the run, and I had to fend off the other chickens that were keen to help themselves to her grub. The others also took time out to peck the top of her head. Hens have an unbridled enthusiasm for natural selection. If you’re ill, you’re a liability to the flock. A bird that couldn’t walk was an unwelcome addition.

In fact, simply introducing her to the flock was the wrong thing to do. Chickens are flocking animals with a rigid social hierarchy—a.k.a. the pecking order—that is generally based on age rather than size and strength. Newcomers should be introduced gradually, or there can be trouble.

This hen, however, was determined. She remained sprawled on her bed and refused to die. After a couple of weeks, the others had accepted her, but I began to wonder if this static existence was a permanent state of affairs. Then, I noticed her clenching and unclenching the claws of one of her feet. Three days after that, she stood up on one leg and began the process of exercising her other foot. Soon she was hopping and limping around the run, and it wasn’t long before she made a full physical recovery and even began laying eggs again!

Growing feathers wasn’t really her forte, and she retained the look of a bingo-playing grandmother with alopecia (especially around the rear end, so winters must have been drafty), but when the time came to give up my flock, she was one of the survivors I had to rehome. I suspect she lived well into old age.

Growing Pains

I said goodbye to my chickens when Harold Wilson was prime minister and Ford was still making the Cortina. The intervening years involved my incarceration in a vegetarian coeducational boarding school. I screwed up my education and was virtually expelled, moved to London, did badly in college, and then worked as an optician’s bicycle messenger before getting fired. I sold trash bags over the phone for two wonderfully manic women, who fired and rehired me three times. After that, I delivered photographs in Fleet Street for the Press Association news agency, became a hopeless public-relations copywriter, got laid off, and found a job cleaning the toilets in a pub.

This was during the rapacious 1980s, which is why I met a girl named Jane who was paying off her student loans by serving pub grub. Instead of a lifetime of student debt, she had about a summer’s worth. Perhaps this made her lightheaded—or, at the very least, clouded her judgment—because she ended up going out with me.

After getting fired from a bookstore, I became a journalist and wrote about personnel officers, dead meat, sewage pipes, and sometimes crooked local politicians. I lived on a houseboat and started writing about cars.

My grandmother died, I got engaged to the girl from the pub, and my mother died. I got a mortgage. I got married. Hens played no part in any of this. I thought about them only when Jane made her insinuating comments that I’d secretly like to keep some more birds.

We were at the top of the backyard when she said, “You could turn that old cold frame into a chicken run.”

I am allergic to all forms of DIY, especially carpentry, but I live with someone who carries a tape measure—along with a notebook and pencil—in her handbag so that she can plan “useful” things. Soon we were measuring and scribbling.

“We’d get five or six hens in there,” I said.

“And we could have one of those chicken houses and move it around in the summer,” said my wife, whom I soon discovered knew how much they cost and where we could buy one. She also seemed suspiciously well informed about who sold chickens.

“So,” she said, “when can you start?”

2: Preparation

Research

The sort of chicken-keeping we were embarking on can be summed up as “quaint” and “middle class.” Not for us was the pragmatic purchase of birds that would lay a lot of eggs and then be sacrificed for the dinner table. We wanted hens as pets. They would have names and would stick with us until they—literally, in some cases—fell off their perches. Jane and I were urbanites who moved to the country, and our indulgent approach to the hens who came to live with us was to prove baffling and, frankly, hilarious to our neighbors.

Before the hens arrived, we did some research by visiting a county fair and peering at what aficionados described as “fancy chickens.” We saw bantams with bulbous, wart-like combs and red faces. We saw birds with giant feathery flares or little fountains of feathers growing from the tops of their heads, giving a sort of bouffant effect. Both Rod and Dave Stewart wore similar coiffures circa 1985.

There were caged, twittering, pigeon-sized bantams that defecated frequently and diminutively into beds of straw that seemed to remain unfeasibly clean. Anxious-looking hens milled about like frustrated train commuters while their stunted male companions stood almost on their toes when crowing with lustful, high-pitched screeches.

At the other extreme, giant, vaguely dinosaur-like birds blinked impassively at the passing human traffic. We saw one enormous cockerel absently tread on one of his rather unkempt girlfriends, who looked irritated but apparently couldn’t work up enough energy to move.

Feathers shone; wattles had a just-scrubbed freshness. We suspected grooming, and we speculated how chicken-keepers might achieve these results, little realizing that it involved shampoo, blow dryers, nail polish, and leg waxing.

The people showing the birds all seemed to be either ladies with print dresses or older gentlemen with sideburns and checkered shirts under their white jackets. They were kind, jolly, and quietly enthusiastic, and they seemed happy to dispense free advice.

We itched to find a cardboard box and take home a big Sussex chicken but managed to resist (with many birds costing between £25 and £30—now such birds are often worth much more). We did invest, though, in several chicken-keeping books to get an idea of what sort of birds we should eventually buy and what constituted appropriate housing for them. At one extreme, we found sweet but slightly rose-colored DIY volumes offering advice on how to turn your backyard into a birdy nirvana. These books all seemed to be illustrated with line drawings of oddly smiling chickens sitting in flowerpots or peeping coyly from beneath sprays of flowers, and they promised endless egg-collection opportunities for cute little children. Nevertheless, they also offered sensible advice, such as making sure that chicken-keeping is legal (it isn’t allowed in some urban and suburban areas, and rental agreements can forbid it), along with basic information on the pros and cons of various breeds.

At the other extreme were sober-looking tomes filled with revolting descriptions of chicken ailments. These black museums of avian morbidity were peppered with grainy black-and-white photos of deformed, defective, and even dead birds. Interestingly, these books of doom also often featured line drawings of oddly smiling chicken faces, but this time attached to knotted-looking intestines.

DIY Don’ts