I have a helper

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Nowadays when I’m working in the garden I have a ‘helper’. We have been keeping chickens now for about 12 years (not the same ones all that time), but for a while now I have been thinking I will give up chicken keeping. I was the only one in the family who was bothered, and certainly the girls never paid them any attention. I didn’t mind doing the feeding and cleaning – after all it was my idea in the first place – but if we wanted to go away somewhere it was getting more difficult as all our suitable friends also wanted to go away at the same times. Most recently we had three, so I decided that when these ones died I wouldn’t get any more, and one by one they have died and now we are down to just one – Violet. We wondered if she might be lonely, and we should look for a new home for her with other chickens, but in fact she seems quite happy. I think she’s actually quite relieved to be rid of her latest companion, Bluebell, who was a bit of a bully. Bluebell definitely wasn’t happy on her own as her raison d’être was to be top of the pecking order so her life had no meaning without companions to subjugate! When we had several chickens we kept them fenced in to part of the garden, where they had plenty of space to scratch about, dustbathe, flap their wings and generally do whatever they wanted, but no matter how large an area we gave them, they would spend half their time trying to get out of it. And if they did there was a real risk they would head straight to our next-door neighbour’s immaculate garden and start scratching up their lawn! But now Violet is on her own she seems happy to stay in our own garden, even though we don’t have any fence around most of it. She potters about, and if I’m doing something outside she comes to see what I’m doing. Of course she likes it if I’m doing some gardening, she can watch to see what delights I might unearth. But even if I’m just sitting and writing outside, she will come and keep me company, and just relax and preen her feathers for a bit before going off to see what else is happening, and then after a while coming back for another check on me. The only real downside is that she wants to come in the house and takes it as a personal affront when I go in and close the door! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2024.