During the height of this Summer’s heatwave and in my own words “Chicken Corner’s phase of theatrical foreshadowing,” two intuitive Light Sussex hens sought the comfort and shade of random and impenetrable hedgerows around the farm. I allowed nature to take its cause - an attitude adopted, I’ve realised, on a more-often-than-not basis. Questionable of course, but how unsuccessful could the outcome possibly be, really?! The answer to this is “Quite to a strong *Very*.” So please, do read on to discover my ignorance, whilst, I imagine, you laugh wickedly to yourself ..
To paint the picture, hen No.1 had just started to hatch. Identifiable by the excruciatingly loud cheeping that built over a series of days until the most anti-climatic moment, both myself and my sister, Olivia, were ever likely to experience. Sitting at the kitchen table, we watched with anticipation a proud and victorious mother emerge from the shrubbery, only to be followed by her (fluffy but ultimately singular) offspring. Yes its very cute but you have to bear in mind that she had been sitting on a nest of around ten eggs .. so oh yeah! .. it was not looking good.
However, Mother Nature has her ways and in this scenario it came in the form of hen No.2, the back-up plan, who remained rigorously seated on her nest roughly ten metres away. A week later therefore, a similar process began to unfold but in a much humbler and eventually fortuitous way.
I will take a moment to indulge, on a personal level, why this particular hen embodied a motto I hold very strongly in life - “Actions speak louder than words” - for unlike her No.1 counterpart who’s baby had cheeped all the right chirps (generally hitting octaves higher than the lead singer in an Opera), hen No.2’s offspring conserved their energy for more sensible and important things, something otherwise known as survival! So with low expectations, when I eventually came to move this hen (a lengthy process, I might add, that resulted in spikes in both mine and the hen’s blood pressures), it was revealed that this clever, and mightily protective mother hen had hatched 7 (7!!) little chicks. It was a beautiful moment as I placed them in their new enclosure and watched them each wriggle back into their cosy residency all curled up within her feathers... So maybe ignorance is bliss?? I'll let you be the judge of that.
Bye chicks x
Written: 7th August 2018
