Friday 30 December 2011

Here chook, chook

(For overseas readers: in New Zealand we call hens 'chooks' - thus this is a tale about hens.)


Who cares about calling birds, French hens, turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree? Once I got a conventional chook for Christmas, but not in the way we usually think of Christmas chooks.
Blackie, a strapping Plymouth Barred Rock who’d outlived seven chooks, needed a companion. I’d bought her along with two Silver Laced Wyandottes whose feathers have the lacy pattern associated with Wild West music hall singers and Flamenco dancers. I named the Wyandottes after girlfriends who were flattered until the shortcomings of the system became evident when Rex’s dog Mo attacked one. I washed her wounds, dried her with a hairdryer - and changed her name. As she couldn’t walk, I’d sit her in the sun; a few bursts of fly killer kept flies away. Amazingly she recovered only to come to a sad end months later thanks to Kate the puppy who I suspect sensed her vulnerability and has since learned not to kill chooks.
I rebuilt my flock with brown shavers from an egg farm, but over the next couple of years the other Wyandotte and a young shaver disappeared in the long grass. It was a mystery. Stoats? Another chook got egg bound and died, one got fly blown (her horrible death shook my confidence as a chook farmer) and an old girl quietly passed away.
The remaining wobbly matron used her wings for stability, but had a can-do attitude and good appetite. Eggs were a distant memory. Plenty of pragmatists suggested I “dong her on the head”, but I liked the feisty old girl.
When she died two days after we’d gone on holiday, the considerate housesitters put a rock on her grave so she wouldn’t be exhumed by the dogs. But the phone wouldn’t work - they’d cut the cable and had to dig her up anyway.
Blackie lived alone until a friend offered me her white chook just before Christmas. Persecuted and pecked by brown shavers, she was living in solitary confinement for her own safety. After she moved in, Whitey was nervy and neurotic, emerging from her pen only for food and water. Blackie, who’d roamed the garden and enjoyed luxurious dust baths, remained closeted with her. What about eggs, you might be wondering. Again, they became a distant memory.
If only I’d got a partridge in a pear tree - at least we’d have got pears.

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