HENS? NOT WHAT THEY’RE CRACKED UP TO BE!
Demand for chickens has soared in lockdown – but beware their high-maintenance ways...
AS millions quietly and collectively lost their heads at the onset of the current emergency, folk stampeded to buy the oddest things. Soap vanished from supermarkets everywhere, car-loads of toilet roll were borne away, hand sanitiser was for weeks unobtainable.
Now the country is being stripped of flour – and hens.
Hundreds and hundreds of people, in the past month, have become backyard poultry keepers, beguiled by the charm of clucking feathered ladies and new-laid eggs for breakfast.
But one fears they may be less than aware of the complexities. Even a small flock of chickens calls for a good bit of land; they will quickly devastate the typical back garden. The coop must be cleaned every day, you must brace yourself for occasional killing – and scattered food and grain are a magnet for rats.
Fortunately, by the standards of the country smallholding, hens are pretty lowmaintenance. Sheep require incessant medication as they are prone to innumerable diseases (in many of which the first symptom is death) and while a kindly neighbour might feed your layers on the odd evening, they will probably draw the line at milking your cow.
Unless you are good with your hands or have some old outbuilding you can adapt, you will need to spend a few hundred pounds on a hen house, which must be wind and watertight and readily secured at night against such predators as the fox and the pine marten.
It should be strewn with frequently renewed litter – typical farm suppliers sell baled wood shavings – and a sheet of hardboard under the perches will make the morning clean easier.
Basic plastic feeders and drinkers cost only a few pounds, you will assess your fencing needs and then, of course, you acquire your guests.
What you want are point-of-lay pullets, which in normal times typically cost a fiver apiece – though, such is demand now, a check online shows widespread, outrageous price gouging.
BUT you must also decide what sort of henwife you want to be. If you would like sturdy and characterful pets that are both adequate layers and will make a good dinner when they, um, retire, then go for the old and classic ‘utility’ breeds – Light Sussex, Rhode Island Red, Maran or Plymouth Rock.
All are big, stately fowl of high immunity to disease and of friendly personality (though Rhode Island cockerels can be aggressive). But if you want maniacal laying machines, go for an industrial hybrid such as Warren or Bovans Brown, bred for high production and docility and which should be replaced every year.
A sensible compromise, for many, is the ‘first-cross hybrid’ – classically the offspring of a Plymouth Rock hen to a Rhode Island Red cockerel and of which the bestknown brand is the Black Rock, bred on a vast scale by the Lovetts of Crosslee poultry farm near Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire.
About 2015 they acquired the broodstock (and rights) from the late Peter Siddons of Muirfield, who devoted himself to perfecting his Black Rocks over 65 years – and, indeed, his righteous aggression against the counterfeit.
‘Beware of the imitators and the imitation birds,’ pants the somewhat underpunctuated website, ‘these lookalike birds do not perform anywhere near reputed expectations with greatly reduced laying life and birds without the same immune system often not meeting half the expectations of Muirfield layers Black Rocks.’
Black Rocks are most attractive hens, with the faintest green sheen to their funereal feathers and a lovely collar of mottled gold.
They are hardy fowl and excellent layers, if a little jumpy in personality, and big enough to make good soup when you feel they have outlived their usefulness.
Alternatively, you can have great fun acquiring hens of assorted breeds to give you multicoloured eggs. Good strains of Maran or Welsummer will give you really brown ones; White Leghorns will deposit eggs of lustrous white, and Araucana – or such British descendants as Cream Legbar or Shetland – lay blue or green eggs, depending on the quality of the breed.
Indeed, the Shetland hen is a beguiling Highland mystery, for they have been on the islands for centuries; the Araucana, the original and only blue-laying fowl, is native to distant Chile. It is entirely possible some startled survivors were swept ashore on
Shetland amid the disastrous retreat of the Spanish Armada.
Cream Legbar hens also have a huge advantage if you plan to breed: male or female chicks can be distinguished at a glance when hatched. Which brings us to the delicate question of cockerels.
The cry of the rooster has echoed through our countryside for as long as anyone can remember, but is these days at the centre of many a village dispute – and even the odd court case.
If you dwell in town or suburbia, it is most unlikely your neighbours will appreciate being aroused each morn at dawn – and, in calm conditions, a cockerel can be heard crowing more than a mile away.
But if you can keep a cockerel, and do not plan any commercial operation – the sale of fertile eggs for the table is prohibited – then your ladies will benefit from his stout protection. And you will quickly identify your best layers, as he instinctively ‘covers’ them most frequently, to use language appropriate for a family paper.
Without the boss man, one particularly assertive hen will rapidly emerge as top of the social heap.
But, with a cockerel, you will have the complications of breeding – of which the first sign is a ‘broody’ or, in that lovely Scots expression, ‘clocking’ hen.
You will find her one morning perched in some assumed nest with a faintly stoned expression, a distinctive cluck and evident vexation at any disturbance.
IT is best, then, to remove her to her own suite and with 13 fertile eggs for her contentedly to incubate: they will hatch in about 21 days. Unfortunately, around 60 per cent of all chicks are male and will have to be slaughtered.
On commercial poultry farms they are gassed within hours; a typical crofter will give them a few weeks before wringing their necks or, if you cannot face that, swift decapitation with a hatchet. (A headless chicken does not actually run about in circles, but it does make an attempt.)
A cockerel should be replaced every year, before he starts breeding with his own descendants.
As for my old ladies, I always let them live as long as they want – latterly laying an enormous egg once or twice a week – and only put them down when they were evidently unwell.
Hens do not prosper on crusts and potato peelings, and if you want lots of large eggs, they should be fed only layers’ meal or layers’ pellets – with chick grain for any babies.
A lot of calcium goes into an eggshell, so oyster grit should also be on offer.
Cleaning the coop is vital; manure builds up quickly and gives off ammonia, soon threatening your ladies’ respiratory health.
The other big threat is red mite, tiny bloodsuckers that will nightly torment fowl if you do not, once a month or so, brush perches with paraffin.
Hens free to express their natural behaviour are a quiet joy to live with, in stately march over a field, wallowing deliriously in improvised dustbaths or joining you in hope of worms when you do any digging.
They are extremely sociable animals – keeping one hen is not kind – and make formidable mothers.
Few sounds are as soothing as contented clucking, or as uplifting as that joyous cackle immediately after laying – and nothing, especially in fearful times, beats your own golden-yolked eggs.