February 13, 2010

It’s been said that “you never quite know someone until you have lived with them”. That’s how I am beginning to feel about the chickens who I have given a temporary residence to in the stable midway until the weather breaks and I can rebuild their coop. I thought I knew my chickens, but….

These gals are driving me a bit up the wall, and I think that poor old Zips is ready for therapy or Xanax if not both! And Louie and Patrick are not too far behind us.

Before the storm and the chickens, the stable was a quiet, settling place where I could go to unwind. I could go there and lean up to any stall door and whisper to one of the horses and hear a breath in return. Or, as I often did, sit down next to a bale of hay and Snoop would rub up against me and give me one of those goat looks that said I was ok in her book. I knew I could always go out to the stable and find peace in this restless world.

But now the stable is the restless world, with nineteen clucking chickens – who never stop clucking! When they are free ranging, chickens are industrious and quiet, scratching and searching for bugs and worms and yummy slug sliders. But now these gals aren’t out free ranging and busy. Instead, they are inside and bored so they just talk and talk and talk. They never stop! Never!

Then they just can’t sit still. They just can’t go roost on a bale of hay. Noooooo! To roost, they gotta “fly” up onto the wheelbarrow, the blanket racks, door handles, water buckets, my shoulder, my head... One gal managed to balance her self on the towel bar on Zippy’s stall door. As she faced the midway, her tail feathers stuck through the stall bars and caught Zippy’s eye. Well, ya know that Zip has two swirls on his head (I will explain that in a later post) and he couldn’t resist plucking out a few of those feathers with his teeth. Needless to say, he seemingly felt a bit of "farm justice" for having been kept awake every night this week by the non stop clucking!

As much as I love the girls – if I didn’t, they’d have been Happy Meal nuggets long ago – I still can’t wait until I get their coop repaired and get them out of the stable. They aren’t the easiest girls to live with! The horses and I want our peace and quiet back, and anyway, Xanax is way too expensive and way too hard to get, especially in horse doses!