Having new chickens has been a bit of a worry. Watching the pecking order sort itself out is not much fun to watch. It’s been wonderful for the lowest in the order of our original hens as she made it quite clear from the moment the new hens arrived she was not going to be pushed around by them.
The capers of these new chickens are a bit of a worry. This picture shows the latest exploits that are still yet unresolved.
Yes, that’s a chicken behind all that vegetation. It was the best photograph I could get.
You see this chicken – who I’ve name Chloe – has flown the pen and the bush and is now roosting half way down the garden on her own. For a long time I had no idea where she was and it was a friend visiting who pointed out the white in the trees.
Our original hens are simply too big and heavy to fly but the new arrivals hop up on top of the pen as soon as they are let out and roam free in the bush with George before flying back in at the end of the day to roost in the chicken house.
At first I found this all rather alarming but as long as they were in bed tucked up at the end of the day and I could count the requisite number of chicken legs I was happy.
But now I have one less pair of legs than I should have at the end of the day. Chloe seems to have got herself a new place to live. She’s up high in the manuka trees but I’m not sure if she intends to stay there for ever or indeed what made her go there in the first place.
Yes these chickens are a worry – almost as much of a worry as bassets. I wonder whether she’s been bullied and decided that living in a tree is a better option that living with the other hens. I hope she sees sense soon and comes home to lie in a nice warm nesting box.
If not, it seems we’ll have a feral chicken.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the winter weather brings home your wandering hen. Presumably if she’s roosting up in the trees she’s not sitting on eggs anywhere. Before we built our hen run we used to get the occasional hen turn up with a batch of chicks from our neighbour’s barns. I always found chicks to be a nuisance, half will die , and half of the rest will be cockrels and if you have to rear any indoors because the hen has got fed up the smell is dreadful. If you want to stop your hens from flying out you can cut the flight feathers on one wing so that they can’t fly properly. But it does make the hen look rather odd.