Several things you probably didn't know about chickens...

Since becoming a chicken momma (Farmer? Handler? Breeder? Afficionado? They just sound wrong) earlier this year, I’ve learned a few things about the feathery critters that I thought I’d share. I’m good like that. I’m not sure if these factoids apply to all hens, or just the 4 crazy mothercluckers I ended up with, but hey, you never know when it might come in handy…

The chicken is a devious, cunning creature 

One of the first things I learned – NEVER trust a chicken. They fooled me at the start, with a convincing display of shyness and reluctance to explore their new home. I gave them loads of food, space and made them chicken toys (usually vegetables on a string). Before I knew it they owned the whole backyard, I’m feeding them nicer muesli than I’d eat myself and giving them hourly feather rubs.

The greatest trick the chicken ever pulled was looking a bit dim...

That’s the scariest thing about chickens– you have no idea what they want until they have it. With a dog, it’s generally food or a walk, with cats, meh, who cares about cats? But chickens never reveal just what it is they’re after. Yet they never leave you alone. Every time I go near the back of the house I can hear them scramble to the back door, and I know when I open it I’ll see 4 pairs of crazy-ass dinosaur eyes staring back at me. “What are you doing?” “Where are you going?” “What’s that?” “Can I eat this?”

Don't you open that back door...

They also take any opportunity they get for entering the house. Seriously, if they had opposable thumbs, I worry what they’d get up to… It’d certainly speed up their eventual take-over of the house and my retreat to the relative safety of the coop, where I’d have to forage daily for bugs and worms for sustanance (because chicken food pellets taste terrible). I’d like to think they’d clean out my poop tray now and again, if only for old times sake.

Chickens will kill you and everyone you love for a slice of bread 

Although initially uninterested in most foodstuffs, chickens will go berserk if they so much as glimpse a slice of bread, or, as I’ve started referring to it “the white stuff”. I’m still not sure if it’s the delicious mix of preservatives and emulsifiers, or the novelty of eating food that’s not in pellet-form, but they just can’t get enough of it. I'm not even going to mention how they react to "the brown stuff".

They don’t need no rooster to lay eggs 

Mmm-hmm, it’s true girlfriend! This phenomenon appears to bamboozle most folks, but suffice to say, chickens produce eggs much in the same way as human females, except that their eggs are obviously considerably larger and their cycle occurs once a DAY. However it is unknown (even by keen chicken scientists such as myself) whether chicks living together synchronise cycles, cry for no reason, feel fat or mill into chocolate and bad ‘80s movies before laying. The research continues…

Chicks night in

Like humans, the name you give your chicks can affect their social standing 

Despite the current popularity of this hypothesis, I didn’t think it was true until I got my chickens. Boo is (sometimes literally) a chickenshit, terrified of pretty much anything – food, doors, sunlight. Stringer Bell is quite dark and broody and is never anywhere to be found when the egg laying goes down. Furious Styles pretty much IS her name – the most aggressive yet elegant of the four (I also considered calling her Crouching Chicken, Hidden Dragon), while Whitey… I feel I made a grave error naming Whitey as I did, based solely on her difference in colour to the others. Little did I know that, despite only comprising a quarter of the chicken population, she’d manage an insidious reign of terror over the others, constantly invading their space, taking their stuff and sometimes making them nest only down at the back of the coop. If she doesn’t calm down pretty soon I may have to get another chicken and call it Malcolm Eggs.

I have failed as a mother

Chickens trends evolve so quickly they like bands you’ve never even heard of 

On opening the coop one morning I discovered Stringer Bell had gone skinhead (or, more accurately, skin-neck, as she’d apparently had difficulty reaching her actual head area). Immediately assuming this was some kind of neo-supremacist show of solidarity with Whitey, I considered whether or not to bring them on a Jeremy Kyle-type show, not so much to resolve the issues as to air them in public, aided by the constant unhelpful patronising commentary from some ignorant orange moron. You have to admit, it’d make good tv – “Chicks gone wild – Nazi hens” or “Concentration coop” or "Why did the chicken cross the road? To go back to her own country". Then I realised that would probably set chicken rights back about a century, and that, although I think they’d all do well in Hollywood, it’d probably be a nightmare for any makeup department. My dilemma was resolved later that week when String emerged with an even newer ‘do, with just enough feathers left on her head to create a look reminiscent of a Mr. T mohawk. Turns out the reality is even worse than my original suspicions - my chicken is a hipster. Or she's just moulting in a really ironic way.

I have SERIOUSLY failed as a mother

Green is the enemy of chickens and must be destroyed 

It took me a while to notice a correlation between letting the chickens out and the destruction of all things green in the backyard, since (see point 1) they never did it when I was looking. At one time my backyard was a verdant utopia of numerous chlorophyll-filled treats; rhubarb leaves, ivy, grass, various weeds, wretched-looking vegetables I was trying to grow, and I’m pretty sure there used to be a tree. Two months later it looks like a post-apocalytic wasteland. It’s not that they’re eating the green stuff either, they just like pecking it to death and leaving fragments of plants strewn all around the yard. Note to self, avoid green clothing. 

BEFORE

AFTER

 

Contrary to popular belief, chickens probably don’t enjoy dressing as humans 

Part of my enthusiasm for keeping chickens was sparked by a ‘90s cartoon, wherein a giant chicken called Boo would dress up and be treated as a human, often gaining positions of power such as sheriff, until one person (generally a hysterical woman no one listened to) realised Boo was no more than a giant chicken. Oh the hilarity. Thus assuming my hens would like the opportunity to similarly advance their careers, I offered them several ensembles I thought fitting of todays modern chick. For one brief moment I felt like the Gok Wan of the chicken world. Then the pecking began.

Chicks and the City. Adapted from my imagination.

In conclusion, NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A CHICKEN.