When their home was ready, we picked up the chickens from a nearby farm and brought them home in a box, my daughter cuddling and reassuring them all the way. It took only a day’s play for her to give them all names, learn their personalities, and advise me on which ones to watch out for.
“Look at the scratch Marge gave me!” she said one day, holding out her hand.
That’s impressive, I said. Marge and Trudy are the troublemakers, aren’t they?
“It’s Marge doing it!” my daughter said. “Trudy’s not really bad at heart – Marge just drags her along and gets her in trouble. Trudy’s like Peter Lorre’s character in Arsenic and Old Lace.”
One of our hens late-bloomed into a rooster, who ... raised questions for a child. A lot. All day. He also darted out of the chicken run whenever I opened the door. I thought he might stay where the food and sex were, but most evenings my daughter and I had to chase him all over the garden to get him back. The first time I grabbed him, I thought I could simply let him go over the fence, and he would flutter gently to the ground like the bird he was. Instead, he dropped like a bowling ball into the mud and was all the angrier the next day.
One night one of ours went missing, and we scoured the nearby woods for an hour and found nothing. Just as I was consoling my sobbing daughter, I noticed a hole next to the coop that led to a tunnel, and poking down it with a broomstick we heard a “BWAK!” The hen apparently started scratching the ground and didn’t stop until she had created a tunnel, and then panicked when she remembered she was a bird.
They were well worth the trouble, though, as they gave us pest control, lawn-mowing, garbage disposal, fertiliser, entertainment, and concentrated protein. They did seem determined to lay that protein everywhere but the coop, though, so on Easter morning my daughter found twice as many eggs as I hid. My daughter resolved to keep an eye on them, and followed them around scolding over their latest infraction, from fighting to pecking at their own manure.
“Don’t do that!” she ordered. “You’ll have your own poo inside you! I mean ... again.”
We tried ducks as well, less successfully. Of course they needed water, and the canal that ran past our property offered endless food and territory; the only problem was how to get them to come back and lay eggs.
Our neighbours the settled Travellers had done this, training their ducks to think of their property as the place to sleep and lay. Their ducks waddled down the road to the canal every morning, feed themselves, and waddled back in the evenings to lay their eggs for my neighbours’ breakfast table. Their flock stayed in the same spot in the canal, in front of their home; I used to tell delivery drivers to “turn right at the ducks.”
My daughter and I tried to follow their careful instructions, luring the ducks a little further out every day with food and then luring them back every evening. We did this for weeks, thinking we were building trust and understanding between ourselves and the birds. Once in the canal, however, they made a beeline for the far bank and stayed out there, laughing at us in the distance.
My daughter seemed on the verge of tears, but I put my arm around her and reassured her that they are home now, where they want to be, and we’ll see them every day. I’m sure they’ll be all right.
"But I worry about them out there, Daddy," she said solemnly. She leaned close and whispered, "They're really dim. And that's by duck standards."
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