The farmyard gets bigger….

The following day we had some more animals to collect; only this time we were far less aware of what we were doing. We had found another English couple an hour away who were breeding birds, some as layers and others as meat – Stu had spoken to them and agreed to have a trio of one Cockerel and two Hens. When we arrived we met Jill first, she was a well dressed lady – didn’t look like a Chicken Farmer at all. We sat in the sun having a cup of tea whilst their ducks wandered past us, the Jack Russell fought for our attention and the Geese made lots of noise in the background. Jeff also sat with us and talked about their life in France and their kids in the UK, how prices had gone up and it was because of the English. As we were talking, I guess he was summing us up in his mind because he decided to bring out some ducklings and gave us a ‘gentle sell’ to try and get rid of some birds. I gave the little thing a cuddle as he looked at me making a funny squeaky noise. He was cute and I loved the idea of some ducklings, but I wasn’t as confident as I was with the kittens and felt that we were already in deeper than we could swim so we should take small steps. I gave him back saying that although we did want ducks this was something we would leave for a while. Jeff took us over to the three birds we had agreed to buy; they were waiting in a very small cage for us. We looked them over as though we knew what we should be looking for, I just saw feet that reminded me of dinosaurs, beaks that looked like they could be painful, a few feathers tufting out on the Cockerel - was their such a thing as ‘tufty feather disease’, perhaps I should be taking this salesman up on my findings, or maybe I’ll just stay quiet in case it’s nothing. We told him we were happy with them and he said he’d show us the rest of his Bird Fleet. We walked up to a dusty area, where we had lots of long pens built from a simple wooden frame and chicken wire attached to one another. The first pen had a Cockerel in it that looked four times as big as it should be, I would have been scared if it had come anywhere near me. The second had some beautiful beige birds – Buff Orpingtons I think they were. I liked them; they were pretty and fairly small. The next pen had quite a few birds in it and they were all pecking at a dead hen, I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t take my eyes off them. How could they be doing that to one of their own? It wasn’t a pretty sight. He moved us on and showed us a few birds that he recommended would be good for us, but I was nervous. Stu and I agreed that we should go home with three and come back another time for some more. We paid our 50 Euros, he put them in a box for us and off we went with our Chickens in the boot. When we arrived home we put them into the house Stu had built for them and put some food down in their little garden area, they pecked around and seemed fairly happy with their surroundings. A little later I was working in the house and I heard a cry of excitement from outside, I ran out only to find Sash looking at me with a big grin on her face – I ran over to the chicken house and she told me to look inside. It was our first egg. Not any old egg either; it was the first bit of produce from our farm, a beautiful warm egg, a blue egg. That night, we decided we better put the Chickens into the house ourselves to show them the night time drill. This seemed like a good idea at first – Sash headed up the team as we talked tactics before entering the Chicken garden. I had a broom, sash had a stick and Karen and Stu just made themselves big with their arms stretched out. We all walked slowly, following Sash’s commands herding the Chickens towards their house; they didn’t like us and they definitely didn’t want to be anywhere near us. Just as we thought we had them close they applied their own tactics similar to the Red Arrows darting off in different directions, just testing how agile we really were. We weren’t as agile as them. The evening went on and the situation didn’t change, the birds outsmarted us every time. Finally Karen, driven by tiredness and a no desire whatsoever to spend the entire night trying to put these birds to bed, mustered up some sort of inner strength and focus to catch a bird. She went for it, cornering the Hen getting two hands around her belly and not letting go as she flapped her wings and struggled, she got her over to the house and in she went. One down, two to go. She didn’t stop there; surprised by her own skills she went on to do the same with the second Hen, only this time Karen did scream a bit but we managed to get the Hen inside before bursting into a fit of laughter. A camera would have been ideal and £250 would have been coming our way from ‘You’ve been Framed’. Just the Cockerel left and he was a much scarier proposition, plus he had found an area behind a building which was difficult for us to get to. Sash and I got into the undergrowth and tried to move him back where we wanted him but in his bid for freedom he flapped his wings so hard that he managed to get over the fence and was heading through the Lilac bush towards our tent in the front field. This wasn’t good, 6 acres and we could have been chasing him all night long. Sash and I shouted to Stu to get round the other side of the Lilac bush and he, like Karen was now at the point of ‘do or die’; the Cockerel needed to get safely into his house so we could go into ours. Stu climbed through stinging nettles and brambles and finally caught the bird, he flapped and squawked but Stu held on tightly and got him back round to the Chicken garden and safely into his house. We locked the door and laughed at ourselves praying that the Chickens would learn to go to bed on their own before too much longer.