Occasional Scribbles

There’s been lots of goings on in the chicken house lately.  I have finally christened ‘Lit’lun’ as she has survived her childhood despite being abandoned by her mother, raised by confused Daddies and guided by Speckle hen, who she now adores and follows all over the place.  She has not been eaten by the Retched Rooks, Magpies nor even the hungry fox who eat her Daddies.  She is pure white, still quite little and is really a bundle of white candyfloss.  She is called Flo.

Meanwhile, as things happen fast in the bird world, Young Henny one or two, (I forget), has hatched out two black babies and two yellow ones from a batch of 7 eggs.  In unseemly haste, once these babies arrrived, she left the nest.  This was proven to be too soon as while she proudly presented her young uns to the rest of the occupants of the shed, a tiny little beak was tapping on the shell of the abandoned remaining  eggs and another yellow baby fought it’s way into the world.  This impatience on the part of YHO, led to the tiny baby, not more than a few hours old, struggle to keep up as she strode out of the house with the others in tow and took them into the garden.

Finally I took pity on him and finding to my relief that yet another hen was now sitting on her eggs, I picked the tiny  baby up and shoved it under her.  Each day following, the baby would follow his natural mother and each day I had to shove it back under the surrogate.  After a few days of this, a bond was formed at last and the hen, deciding that it was much too boring to stay on eggs when she now had a ready made baby, gave up her nest and became a full time Mum, joinng YHO and her babies around the garden.  All working out fine, I thought with satisfaction.

But it was not to be.  For a couple of days, things went really well.  The two mums (who we must remember, let the Retched Rooks’s steal their previous babies, having no idea how to deal with them), strolled around in tandem, as proud as punch.  They took the brood in the green house for a rest when the little ones got cold and tired, they let them share the luxury of their very own dust baths and didn’t squash anyone and dutifully caught flies which they allowed the babies to take from their beaks.  The perfect parents.  Occasionally they got a little over zealous.  I watched from the kitchen window as one mum scraped back the grass under the honeysuckle bush with such force that the baby unwisely standing behind, got a whole lot of mud straight in the face, causing him to tumble over backwards.  He righted himself only for it to happen all over again.  Not the place to stand when mum is looking for grubs! 

All was peace and serenity until a day or two ago, when I noticed one yellow baby was lagging behind the family.  They would head off to the back of the garden, the mums would be searching out food as the babies ran expectantly alongside, scrabbling to be the first to eat.  The yellow one, would finally catch them up, by then exhausted, only to find them moving on again.  I brought him in for a while to recover and placed him carefully under the mum at night when he struggled to get into the raised nesting box, but when I went in this morning he was dead. 

Then I noticed the exact same pattern with another baby, looking weak and tired.  I have him now in a box with a hot water bottle underneath and he is very frail indeed.  Not long I think for this world. I am a bit foxed about this, since he is not that young and has a few feathers along his tiny wings.  He should be stronger than the others as he is clearly older.  Every now and then he cheeps as he hears the others outside, but he is too weak to put out with them.  I will put him under Mum tonight but I fear he will go the way of his brother.

We are not doing well with our brood this year.

P.S.  He died before I got to publish this 😦