Chickens

Although this actually happened Monday, I havent had the free time (or the inclination) to write about something this funny.

Monday morning as I was throwing some milk bottles over the fence into the Big Shed, I heard a funny little 'cheep, cheep' sound. Whilst thinking in my head 'what the heck is that?' I searched around a little, and on the 'secret' nest (from where Michael and I have been stealing our eggs from, up until the stupid chook decided to get clucky!) was the red hen (who almost NEVER get clucky) with a little black chicken sticking its head up through her feathers! Sooooo cute!! And a black one!! Oooh, I was just giddy with the joy of it all! Its been ages since we last had chickens :)

So I dutifully call Mum (who's busily trying to fill in all of the administration forms at the hospital) to inform her of my profound discovery...only to find out that I now have the additional job of having to catch her! Bummer!

So, just on dark, I con my wonderful, trusting husband into putting on some washing up gloves (to protect him if she decides to turn nasty) and get him to help me drag a HUGE box up to the Big Shed. And he does it willingly cos he loves me so much :)

Under cover of darkness, and after much whispering as to our strategy for catching her (which included me threatening my husband that he MUST NOT let her go under any circumstances!) we quietly open the gate and with me holding the torch, Michael leapt on her! And he didnt let her go! He scooped her up like a football, spun around and dumped her in the box...just like we'd planned :)

Meanwhile, Im still recovering from the shock from the speed of it all and scoop up three tiny chickens :) Once I heard a strangled 'CHEEP!' I realised I was holding them a little too tightly! LOL!

When I placed them in the box, I noticed there were 2 others already in there! Michael had grabbed them up when he'd picked up the mother hen :) So we laughed about it lots, then turned to re-investigate the nest. There was one dead chicken - and it was a highly prized black one, so that was sad, but there was only one egg that wasnt hatched out. This we thought, was weird, as she had at least 13 eggs under her the last time I'd looked. We put the dead chicken in the burn off bin, and placed the un-opened egg under the hen (these eggs will almost never hatch as the mother wont sit on them anymore, but we thought we'd try).

We'd considered ourselves very successful as we now had 5 chickens, and egg, and a very disgruntled mother hen all safely locked up in a box (If we hadn't have caught her, as soon as she got off the nest to take the chickens for a walk, the peacocks would have killed them).

That is, until I did a head count the next morning...and there were EIGHT chickens in the box!!!
Some how Michael had picked up FIVE chickens AND the chook all in one fowl swoop (heh heh).
So we now had 2 black, 2 dark grey, and 4 white chickens with black spots...they look like Molly :)

That's all I got :)