Chooks and chickens
Having grown up with chickens roaming round the yard and the boisterous crowing of the roosters as part of the soundtrack of my childhood, it seemed only natural that we should have some of the feathery fowl.
Getting started was easy enough as my mother still keeps a motley crew of hens. Working through the technicalities has been a little more challenging. Chickens are generally low maintenance, forage for a good portion of their food and offer a variety of valuable by-products including eggs, meat, earth moving, feathers, manure and body heat.
Assuming you have a rooster, their tendency to hatch out large numbers of babies means, for better or worse, the size of your flock can grow very quickly.
The chickens took off into the bush all afternoon yesterday. I heard them way down in the forest towards the evening and could hear them flapping up into a tree for the night. They are back this morning and layed an egg first thing. Hopefully we get a second egg by lunchtime.
We've decided to let them sleep in the trees and so far we haven't had anymore eaten by ferrets. It's a good arrangement as long as the chooks come and lay eggs for us in the morning. So far so good.
As these are all from her own eggs they share a resemblance to the mother, all tiny and shades of brown.