Carol's Chickens

Since Emerald and Speckles have become the only two bigger girls, amongst a flock of little girls, the dynamics of the flock have changed totally.

It has become a happier, quieter, more settled and harmonious flock. But it’s not just that, it has changed in some other, more surprising, ways. Emerald and Speckles have changed slightly. There are two things going on here but I will start with Speckles as it is easier to demonstrate with a few photos.

Speckles is acting like a mother hen with her babies around her. She appears to be treating the five little girls like her brood. She is often sitting in the middle with all the little girls around her.

Speckles is surrounded by her little flock

The little girls sit in a group around Speckles

Cinnamon is sitting behind Dandelion but you can’t see much of her as she is so small. Emerald is never far away but it is always Speckles at the centre of the group.

When I take in the treats Speckles calls the little girls over to the them. She makes that sound that they all make when they discover something good and cockerels do similar when they find a tasty titbit and want to share it with their girls. With Speckles though it is different to how she has been before. She gets very excited and keeps making the “here is a treat” sound over and over while making no attempt to take the treat herself. She waits until all the little girls are with her and are taking the treat before she will have a little herself.

She does this with the morning corn and bedtime sunflower hearts, whereas before she would have just joined in. Now she hardly touches the corn as she is so busy calling the little girls and watching over them. She appears to be behaving like a mother hen to her brood.

With Emerald it took us a while to even discover that her bit of behaviour belonged to her. During the summer we sleep with our bedroom windows wide open. We hear lots of noise from outside in the early hours of the morning. We hear the deer barking in the woods behind our property and the pheasants calling. We hear the noisy jackdaws and all the birds of the dawn chorus.

Then every morning at around five o’clock or soon after we would hear a strange cry that sounded a bit like a cockerel and yet not. It was a loud, sort of strangled sound, that we had never heard before. It had about five notes to it but it was more of a screech than a call. It would only come once or twice each morning. It sounded as if it came from something large. I said that it couldn’t be our girls because it was a sound that I had never heard before.

The family four doors away have two standard sized chickens and I wondered if it came from them but we were also convinced that it wasn’t a chicken sound. It was such a strange sound that my husband even wondered if it was from some sort of  dog at one point. We puzzled over it for a few weeks.

Emerald is always the first to sound the alarm call if there is a cat in the garden and then all the other girls join in with her. Emerald will stand on one of the branch perches at the end of the run with her neck stretched and she will shout. We heard this commotion one day and went up to investigate. Just at that moment Emerald uttered the sound that we had been hearing. We saw and heard her do it twice.

Mystery solved. We couldn’t believe that the sound had come from her. We have had her for four years and have never heard her make this sound before. I wonder if she is taking on, a bit of a cockerel role, as the head of a flock of little girls.

The automatic door on the chicken shed opens at first light so the girls are out at about five o’clock during the height of summer which may explain why we were hearing the cry, at about that time, a bit like a cockerel crowing at dawn.

It may seem rather fanciful but it does seem like Emerald and Speckles have taken on a parental role with the little girls. They seem to be looking out for them. It is a far cry from the past battles and bullying that we have seen within the flock. It really does appear that Emerald and Speckles are in tune together as a pair looking after their flock of little girls.

It is all quite fascinating to see and I am really pleased to have a happy, harmonious, flock.

Since we have had the little girls, by which I mean the seramas, Rusty and Freckles have always perched on their own perch on the left hand side of the shed and Cinnamon, Dandelion and Apricot have always perched on their own perch on the right hand side of the shed with the bigger girls on the, higher, perch at the back of the shed. The bigger girls now just consist of Emerald and Speckles.

But recently Cinnamon has taken to going in first and perching on the right hand side of the bigger back perch. She has been perching behind the perch that Dandelion and Apricot roost on. I thought that maybe it was because she had gone in first and that she would be lonely on her own during the night so each evening I moved her from there to the perch next to Dandelion and Apricot.

After a week or so when she was continuing to do this I decided to leave her. I realised that if she was consistently perching there every night then that must be where she wants to be. Emerald and Speckles were taking no notice of her at all.

Then one evening Cinnamon was perched on the left hand side of the back perch next to Speckles and Emerald. It seems that she has decided that she is part of the bigger girl’s group now. They have accepted her and don’t bother her at all.

This is another thing that has changed completely since Peaches and Barley have left the flock. There always used to be lots of bumping around and head pecking between the bigger girls at bedtime. Now Emerald and Speckles perch side by side without any fuss and bedtime is an easy, quiet and settled affair. Now it seems that even a little girl joining them is quite acceptable.

Cinnamon now perches here most nights

You can see why I thought Cinnamon might be lonely.

Apricot and Dandelion on their perch

Rusty and Freckles on their perch

Cinnamon perches with the bigger girls

It’s amazing how the dynamics of the flock have changed so much with just two bigger girls. There is no longer any bullying and the whole flock are harmonious. I think that Emerald and Speckles would accept any of the little girls perching besides them.

It is funny how Cinnamon, who is our smallest girl, has decided that she wants to be with the bigger girls. I have decided that she is capable of choosing where she wants to perch so I am leaving her to perch where ever she likes.

Last night I took my camera out with me again to see where she had landed up this time.

Cinnamon was pretty much much snuggled up to the bigger girls

Cinnamon has definitely decided that she belongs with the bigger girls. This is so sweet to see. Speckles is quite happy to have her alongside.

As we suspected the fourth and final arch was a really difficult one to do. There is so much weight in the rose and it is so thorny. It took us until nearly dinner time, yesterday evening, to finish it so we we left further pruning for the next day.

I had made a start but it was daunting as it’s very prickly and very difficult to reach. We were satisfied that all the structures were in place and we could continue cutting back the rose the next day.

The final arch before we began

Work begins on the final arch

The final arch is finished

Final arch

Side view of the final arch

All four arches

From further back

All four going up the path

We were really pleased with the end result and it’s only this last arch that needed more pruning to be done. We should then be able to keep them under control. It looks so much better than it did before.

Today we got a second wind and had another go at pruning the rose. I had taken a photo before we did the final arch.

Before the final arch

After the fourth arch has had it’s final prune

This is the final arch after some more pruning. I was trying to get rid of the tunnel effect and keep the planting contained to each arch and along the fence.

There is now a lot more light up the path and my husband can walk up the path without stooping or getting his head scratched. Even the tallest of people could now walk easily up the path. We are so glad it is finished and we are really pleased with the end result.

We are now on a roll with this project. Luckily we are having a quiet week, work wise, so are getting on with this in the afternoons.

This arch went up much easier than the one before. We have found that it is easier to get the vertical rungs of the ladder in place once the uprights are in situe. This one also had no prickly rose to contend with.

Work begins on the third arch

The first ladder is in place

The third arch is completed

Looking the other way

From further back

Just the last one to do which is at the bottom of the path. This may be the worse one to do because it has really heavy growth of the extremely prickly rose. We will be so glad when that one is completed.

When you read the title it sounds so easy. I can assure you it wasn’t!

We thought that after the first arch was done it would get easier but the second one proved to be much more difficult than the first one. There were several difficulties. One is the fact that the path is sloped so when making the uprights to the ladder part of the arch one leg of the ladder needs to be longer than the other to take in the slope but the horizontal parts still need to line up accurately.

The other thing is that we were working in amongst a tangle of growth some of which is the rose and therefore very prickly. This arch had a much more heavy amount of growth on it. The whole process was really difficult with the ladder parts coming apart many times while we were trying to get it positioned. The weight of the growth really didn’t help matters.

We struggled all afternoon with it and had to clamp the horizonatal parts and leave it overnight to set. It was glued and nailed.

The next morning I didn’t have any lunches to deliver so I set about getting the growth secured to the new arch. This was also much more difficult. This arch was so overgrown that the growth had joined up between this arch and the first one (yet to do) and had made a tunnel effect. We had always intended to keep the growth to each separate arch but this wasn’t the case in this part as it had grown out of control.

The growth needed to be pushed back to the wooden struts but with the rose from the first arch entangled in with it, I would have been ripped to shreds handling it. The only thing to do was to painstakingly cut the rose to separate the two arches. Once I had cut back the rose I created a gap between the two arches.

I was then able to push the growth (honeysuckle and clematis) back to the wooden arch and tie it in. It took me several hours to get the job done. I was really pleased with it once it was done. We should now be able to keep each arch contained. It has also let in a lot more light to the path, the patio area and through the cabin windows.

We think that this was the most difficult one to tackle so we are hoping that the rest won’t be as bad to do. My husband did say that if we had done this one first he may have given up on the job. Tempers were rather frayed during this process and we both have rose scratches to show for it.

Work begins on the second arch

The second arch is completed

The growth on this arch is now separated from the next one

The two arches from the other direction

We will be very glad when all four arches are completed but we think that it will all be worth it in the end.

I think ourselves lucky that at the moment we are only having one girl go broody at a time but it does seem to be working it’s way through the little girls.

The little girls lay, on average, every other day. Apricot has now laid ten eggs in twenty two days. The last egg that she laid, she stayed sitting on. I took her out of the nest box and she kept returning. At bedtime she was still in there and I moved her to the chicken shed and closed the nest boxes.

The next day she was in the nest box every time I went out to the girls and I just kept removing her. This seems to break them out of it after about three days. She is docile and easy to handle but the tell tail sign (excuse the pun) is that when I open up the nest box her tail goes up. I now know that this is the sign of a broody serama.

Broody Apricot

She does look so cute though, with her tail up over her back.

I kept taking her out of the nest box every time I went into the run and it only took two days before she was staying out of the nest box. It was good to see her having a good time in a dust bath once more.

As this was short lived I would imagine she would start laying again in about a week. I wonder who will be next to go broody!

Our next door neighbours, and good friends, have a beautiful hydrangea in their front garden. They inherited it from previous people living there as it has been there from before we moved here and our neighbours moved in after us.

At the weekend we were having friends to lunch. I usually pick a small vase of flowers from our garden but as the hydrangea was hanging over our garden wall I picked a few blooms. I knew our neighbours wouldn’t mind.

Our neighbour’s hydrangea

I love the pink and blue centres

It is so beautiful hanging over our wall

Hydrangea blooms in a vase

I think our neighbours would be happy to share it with us as they say they enjoy having our roses peeping over their back fence. We have a climbing rose with tiny pink blossoms that overhangs their fence.

Rambling rose that we share with our neighbour

Close up

We also inherited this rose when we moved in and it is so delicate and pretty. It is good to be able to share some of the pretty things in our gardens.

We put the metal arches in, up our garden path, to hold our roses, honeysuckle, clematis and jasmine, when we first moved here, ten years ago. We bought the metal arches because they were the cheapest option at the time and we needed four of them.

They did the job because the climbing plants we had put in were just getting started. Ten years on the roses have become heavy and the metal arches are no longer up to the job. They had began to buckle and break. It was time for something more sturdy.

After looking at options we could buy it soon became clear that everything was going to be really expensive and it would be difficult to find something the right shape and size for the job.

My husband decided that the only option was to buy some wood and make something himself. Buying the materials we needed would be a fraction of the price of anything ready made and he could make them to fit.

This weekend he made a start on the worst one. We decided that we would tackle the job one arch at a time starting with the most broken ones first.

He decided to start fitting the new arches and then break out the metal ones. He made them higher than before so that we could raise the rose up giving us more space underneath. My job was to cut loose all the wire and then retie everything once we had finished.

The old metal arches

Making a start on the first wooden arch

The first arch is finished

The arch from the other direction

We are both really pleased with the end result. It fits in so much better with everything else in the garden. It looks rustic, it’s really sturdy and it gives us more space underneath. It will make it much more manageable to keep the planting where we want it.

Only three more to go! We will probably try to do one each weekend until we get the job done. I think it’s going to look really good when it’s finished.

The rose at the top of the garden is much more manageable, since we gave it a hard prune in spring, ready for the new fence. I think it actually shows the blooms off better. The fence has gradually all but disappeared and we are achieving a hedge of shrubs in front of the fence.

The fence has almost disappeared

The rose is much more manageable

Close up of the blooms

The veg plot has matured

The broad beans are coming along nicely

Courgettes are coming too

I think we may be eating some produce by next weekend. I am looking forward to some home grown veggies.

Emerald has been moulting heavily for the past couple of weeks. I wasn’t sure about Speckles though as she was still growing some feathers from where she had been plucked but for the last few days she didn’t look happy.

She was sitting in the run looking miserable. I had thought that if I didn’t know better I would think she was moulting. I started to worry something was wrong with her and then I found some of her feathers in the run. I felt relieved, she is just moulting.

Speckles always looks miserable when she moults. I checked back to last year and she started to moult in July and Emerald started to moult after her. It’s all a little early this year.

I think Emerald is moulting earlier because she continued to lay eggs three weeks longer than usual and then had a brief, broody moment, for the first time ever. I think this triggered the moult.

I think Speckles having been plucked and growing new feathers may have triggered her early moult. Since she started growing back her feathers she has only laid two eggs but they were both whoppers!

The little girls are all laying, on average, every other day so they are keeping us supplied with enough eggs for our needs even though we eat the eggs, two or three each, at a time. It will be great if they continue like this through the winter.

Speckles looks sad

Emerald has one tiny tail feather left

Two scruffy girls together

It will be quite good to get the moulting over and done with, both at once. The little girls just moult a few feathers each day, all year round, which means that they should continue to lay all year round. This also means that I only have to pick up loads of feathers from the two bigger girls. It is a different experience for me this year.

It will be interesting to see if the little girls really do lay all winter. It will be great if they do as it would mean we would have a constant supply of eggs and I wouldn’t need to buy any.

They do take a break from laying each time they go broody but if they continue to do this one at a time there will still be enough girls laying to keep us supplied.