Strange Eggs

I'll confess to one year paying for a half dozen "double yolker" eggs (pre-chook keeping) around Christmas time; Mr Mum and I were living apart at the time, money was tight and the idea being, I would cook my two boys some egg on toast for their breakfast Christmas morning and then act all "The Big FC must have cast his magic over our eggs! How special is *that*!?"

It made a memory

 

Chickens are decendents of T-Rex, clue!

 

We learn our moderating skills from Chickens.

 

This is something I've never understood. How come we so often use the word 'chicken' to mean 'coward' or 'scaredycat'?

Chickens can be quite fiesty, and I can't actually think of one encounter that would make me think a chicken was anything but stupidly brave.

 

Quite!

 

When I had my first allotment when I was 18, the next plot to my dad's, I let his chickens through the fence into my side while I broke up the ground, knowing that they'd love the opportunity to feast upon all the worms that get exposed as I dig. The thing is, because the ground had been neglected for many years, it was rock hard, and my my favourite tool of choice for the first pass on virgin ground is the pick axe. It didn't take the chickens long to figure out that for the first couple of seconds after I'd just smashed a hole in the ground, that's when the best worms are there before they escape back underground, so the chooks would get ready to charge in the moment I broke the ground. They got over excited after a short time, and started to pre-emptively run onto the patch where they'd worked out the pick would land, based on my lifting the pick above my head and starting the downward sweep. Even for a lad in his prime (me back then), its not easy to do an emergency change of course for a pick axe once its set off in full swing. On numerous occasions it was only by a few inches that I avoided smashing a chook in half with the pick after it ran right into the path of it. So based on that, I'll stick with 'stupidly brave'

 

Ah, but the *real* point is ... you missed Thus "brave"

Based on your advice about clay soil/straw, when Mr Mum cleans out the runs, I have a section of hard core "clay earth" which I've instructed asked him if he would kindly add the run offerings to it and mix it in; now, my Cocoa, a cuckoo maran, follows Mr Mum around like her life depends upon it! Today, he was run mucking out renovating while I supervised was performing an operations management exercise. As he piled the run offerings into the the hard core clay, Cocoa was all excited and scratching around as he plonked, raked, dug, mixed and raked some more. She escaped, completely unscathed; despite the up, over, down and out mechanisations of Mr Mum and his ham fist

Brave, but never "stupidly" so is my experience

 

Yep, don't mess with a Chicken on a mission. If mine wanted my pasty then it was as good as gone.

 

No Zigster ... if mine wanted my pasty, they would be given the parts I did not want (prime pieces, for sure Mr Defra!); I am their Rooster, they know it

 

I think chooks are incredibly brave....i couldn't kill a mouse , eat a slug or walk around naked in winter