You never know how the day is going to turn out. In between showers, Miss and I take the opportunity to go for a walk around the village, as you do. Less than quarter of a mile into the walk we smile a “good afternoon” at a lady coming towards us (we still smile and greet strangers here, we’re a bit rural), and she says “do you know anything about chickens?”
Well, yes, we reply. Because we do. “Oh, well I have a lost chicken in my garden and I don’t know what to do.” says she. And so, off we go, into her extensive front garden, and there’s the chicken. Lost looking. Chickens tend not to be very cooperative about being caught, and this one wasn’t interested at all in any faked chock, cook noises and waving of hands full of imaginary corn. Turns out they’d fed it earlier, before the whole awfulness of it intruded.
After driving it around in circles for a while, and causing it to become ever more suspicious of my intentions, I grabbed one of those big gardening bins in an attractive lime green and tossed it over the distracted bird. That’ll learn it! Wrapping her in an old dog blanket (delightful) that magically appeared once I’d caught the chicken, we returned home and dropped her off with the girls, then continued on our interrupted wander.
The term ‘pecking order’ comes from chickens, who can be quite savage in settling discussions on who is in charge and who very much isn’t. The new girl has wisely stayed inside the coop all afternoon, but later this evening the other six who are more accustomed to calling the coop ‘home’ will go in for the night. It may be a bumpy evening…
Anyhow, we’ve put a note on Facebook and on the local village web site. If she survives the night she may be claimed by her previous keeper. Alternatively, well, one more egg a day can’t be bad, eh.
Isn’t it sweet how they all line up in pairs? They’re not looking at me of course, Miss is in the vegetable beds pulling chard… they like chard.
Rosher.Net 
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