Yum!

I don’t normally have cooked breakfasts unless I’m staying in a hotel at someone else’s expense, but this morning I treated myself to two rashers of bacon and last night’s egg.

What it lacked in substance when fried, it more than made up for in taste, as it was delicious – though I’m still getting my head around the notion that it was produced at the bottom of our garden: part of me thinks that it was a practical joke perpetrated by one of our neighbours.

But we need to get used to this quickly: once they start laying, apparently they won’t slow down until the winter, so we’ll be dealing with hundreds of these over the next few months.  I suspect an output graph or two will be posted when the rate really accelerates.

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We have our first egg!

Picture of an egg next to a 10p piece for size comparison

As you can see, it’s quite small, and there’s no way of knowing (short of some kind of poultry DNA test) who produced it because we didn’t catch her in action – though Pearl and Vi seem like the most likely candidates based on age and broodiness, and the colour suggests that it’s probably Pearl’s. It’s definitely not Ida’s, because her eggs will be blue and in any case she’s too young.

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What happens when you…

…throw a single slice of melon into a pen containing four chickens? 

We saw them giving us the answer yesterday evening, laughed a lot, and asked them to put on a repeat performance in better light today.

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The Great Escape #2

“Oh my God, what’s that?”

I quickly scanned the garden, alighting on the swing, on which my son was doing his level best to strangle himself but still seemed hale and hearty.

“No, not him – on top of the chicken pen!”

A large grey bird was perched on top of the pen, six feet above the ground.  At first, it looked like a huge pigeon, but on closer inspection it turned out to be Vi, who had clearly been eavesdropping on last Thursday’s philosophical discussion and had decided to prove that she could fly after all.  But then, having reached the top of the pen, she’d clearly got very confused and wasn’t at all sure where to go next.

This time round, it was much easier getting her back in the pen – after wobbling unsteadily on the top, she flew back down to join the others.  But we’ve added some kind of roof to our shopping list – which we were planning to get anyway after Jane had a dream about a fox getting in over the top by vaulting over the chicken house.  This time next month it’ll probably be electrified razor wire – in fact, we’re already referring to the pen as the State Henitentiary.

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Feathered friends

A couple of pigeons watch the chickens from a distance

Along with these two pigeons, we’ve had magpies and a seagull popping in to say hello to their new feathered friends in the chicken pen. Or at least that’s what I’d write if I was the kind of numpty who assumes that birds are as twee as Little Lord Fauntleroy, but in fact I haven’t a clue: they’re just as likely to be planning a daring raid on the chicken feeder and weighing up the odds of getting pecked to death in the process.

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The Great Escape #1

A red-haired child approaching the chicken pen

The chickens are pretty blasé about adults approaching them, but they queue up expectantly whenever they spot what they probably refer to as “red-haired food girl”, because her arrival usually coincides with them getting some kind of treat (usually a handful of corn). In fact, about half a minute later, Vi (back, left) got a particular treat in the form of an opportunity to escape, which she grabbed with both claws, spending the next 10-15 minutes running around the outside of the pen wondering why none of the corn was reaching her but not quite grasping the fact that it was being deliberately thrown into the pen in front of her to try to coax her back in.

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Trespassers will be pecked

The chickens are fighting over a slug.  That’s nature red in tooth and claw for you.  Or possibly beak and claw in this case.

But it’s hard to get too emotional about the situation, as it was the slug’s fault for voluntarily entering the pen in the first place, possibly to nick some of the chickens’ water.  That’ll learn it.

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Chickens and birds

Me: Are you going out to feed the birds?
Daughter (seven): No, the chickens.
Me: Chickens are birds.
Daughter: (derisively) No they’re not!
Me: So why aren’t they birds? They have feathers and beaks.
Daughter: They can’t fly.
Me: Penguins can’t fly, and they’re birds.
Daughter: (confidently) No they’re not.

UPDATE: The nonsensicality of this argument was exposed a few days later.

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Ida and Queenie

Ida and Queenie sitting in the entrance to the chicken hut

This snuggly double portrait was unimaginable as recently as Thursday, when the bigger chickens were still taking turns to persecute little Ida (left), at least when they weren’t doing it collectively as a trio. But Ida has since realised that when Queenie (right) is on her own, she’s essentially a placid soul – in fact, since Ida is still growing and has a visibly livelier temperament and a greater propensity to take risks (such as nicking the others’ food while they’ve lifted their beaks for a millisecond), it wouldn’t be at all surprising if the pecking order gets recalibrated in the not too distant future.

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Great Chicken Scenes #1: ‘El Bruto’ (1952)

Given that I work as a film critic for my day job, I naturally can’t resist celebrating some of the great chicken scenes that have graced the silver screen over the last century and a bit, so this will be a regular feature on this blog.

And we’re starting with one of my favourites, in Luis Buñuel’s undeservedly obscure Mexican film El bruto (1952), aka The Brute, in which the villainous Katy Jurado comes face to face with a rooster as she skulks away from the scene of a crime.  It’s as close to a perfect ending as I’ve ever encountered – and yet, like much else in Buñuel’s work, its effect is both weirdly potent and largely inexplicable.

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