How It Started

 We woke up this morning to this. Not a lot of snow but unexpected as it's all supposed to dump on us tomorow.

                                                                 Bouncer

 The chickens love their porridge laced with codliver oil, cider vinegar and de-wormer!!

                                                                     Pixie a.k.a. Miss Piggy

Ducks are not happy with the resticted swimming zone.
So, this is how it all started with a friend asking me to look after her chickens while she was on holiday. Simple, easy, no trouble at all, perhaps we should get some. So I put my name down for some ex-battery hens from the British Hen Welfare Trust, (BHWT), and collected three hens in July 2011. Two were in pretty good shape the other one loked like a Road Runner, no feathers on her neck rump or chest. Still, the first night they went off to bed without any problems and we had three eggs the next day. We built them a nice run round the veg plot which has a Beech hedge they could hide under and scratch about, have a nice dust bath, all the things that the natural instinct said they should do.
The boys named them, Alden had Pecky, David had Floppy and Peter, well he named his after his favourite tank at the time, General Lee!!
After about three months they had feathered up nicely, the combs which had been all floppy now had shrunk to near normal size and were almost standing up and overall they looked good. Floppy was the friendly one and didn't mind being picked up for a cuddle, she was the 'Golden One' of the three and In Charge!
Sadly, she became ill one day in September last year and died, leaving two rather confused hens.

This was Pecky, now she is the Leader of the pack. So, in October I went back to the BHWT and had two more ex-batts, Gladys and Flo. Flo was also fairly featherless and lasted only two months, not unusual for these chickens I'm told as they cannot always cope with the stress of free ranging after close confinement all their lives. As you can see from the picture above the three are fully feathered, fluffy and OK, just waiting for them to start laying eggs again on a more regular basis.