Another Country Diary #27
With the end of flockdown.
18/5
The end of hen lockdown—or flockdown—has arrived. Since before Christmas they’ve been restricted to a covered run to prevent contact with wild birds. Avian flu has been particularly bad this year, especially in Norfolk, and even owners with small flocks have to abide by the housing order. Today we get to let the hens free, but there are a few jobs to be done first.
Ivy has spread over some fallen elder trees to the rear of the hens’ fenced area. Its height concerns us—it’s tall enough that a fox might use it as a foothold to jump the fence. I fight my way through the undergrowth of the copse, lopping small branches and saplings, and thrashing back nettles, to reach the area with the ivy. I cut it back as best I can, uncovering in the process the entrances to what I assume are the nests of the rats that come to raid the layer pellets on a daily basis. The entrances are about four inches across. One is under the fallen trunk of an elder tree, and the other in a few metres away, and more brazenly in the open. By the time I finish cutting back the ivy, the area looks much better, but I’m still not convinced that a really persistent, hungry fox, couldn’t scale the fence if it wanted to. I suspect though that the scent of next door’s dogs will keep them away. We lost a hen to a suspected fox attack two years ago, and another to a possible sparrowhawk attack, so we are not paranoid to be wary.
Next, we need to clip the wings of the hens. We let them out one at a time, and grab them. The knack is to clasp them firmly under one arm, controlling their wings, then one person with a pair of scissors can give one of their wings a trim, cutting the feather back by about a third of their length. This creates a flight imbalance, and makes it less likely that they’ll fly over a fence into danger. The first hen, Toffee, is from a semi-feral flock and was born in a hedge, so she proves feisty and difficult to catch. It takes several attempts before we manage. The two brown hens are relatively easy, though strong if you hold them incorrectly. The lavender araucanas are a fairly docile breed and easy to handle. Our oldest hen, Mrs Wintersea, we leave unclipped as she is probably too heavy to get far off the ground. Once they are all out, we are able to begin to pack up their covered run. Some of the aviary panels I used for the run are now rotten, and snap as we upend it to lean against the fence. I will need to rebuild it long before the winter. I imagine there will be another housing measure. Of the six winters we have owned hens I think that only three have been free of flu scares. It seems to be a problem that is getting worse over time, and there is mounting evidence that climate change is increasing its virulence and spread1.
On release the hens are immediately grubbing about, kicking up little clods of earth, and pecking for insects. One finds three earthworms almost immediately. Hens are pretty brutal when it comes to insects, worms, and slugs. If it is within pecking range and too slow then it will be eaten. Hens peck everything that might stand a reasonable chance of being food, including my wedding ring. I’m pretty sure that the hens do not love us, but they do associate us with the food that we bring. If we were incapacitated in the run, they would peck us rather than raise the alarm. The plants that have been springing up in the hens’ area will be gone in a matter of days, the nettles and sapling oaks stripped and eaten.
As I’m writing this entry, Ceci taps on the window behind me. She holds a toad—a bufo bufo, a properly warty specimen. Up close, it has the sort of skin you might imagine would cover the hide of a stegosaur. It is breathing, that much I can tell, and probably resigned to being eaten. Today is its lucky day. Ceci lets it flop into the pond. This is a toad-friendly parish. The village pond is a breeding spot, and we have special toad signs to warn motorists driving into the village at the peak breeding time of year.
19/5
The red kites are wheeling and mewing over on old oak on the village’s edge. It grows next to an overgrown field pond. We wonder whether they are nesting. There is a female and the smaller male. If they are nesting then there should be no shortage of food around as squirrels seems to be throwing themselves under cars at the moment. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kite taking carrion from the road. There is also a rabbit warren next to the pond, so perhaps a further source of food.
There is a warm dry wind as we walk up the lanes. The sky is a deep blue and the sunlight intense, despite it already being after six. I suppose we are already only a month away from midsummer, and the sun is still high at this time. We watch a bumble bee visit a pink hawthorn flower and we talk about the way some hawthorn has pink flowers, and others white. The pink flowers still seem to be at their peak. In the hedgerows by the track to ‘the top’ the elder trees are blossoming, the brambles as well.
I lock up the hens later than usual. Two brown rats beat a retreat as I approach and I find the food container nearly empty. One of the rats hovers behind the mesh of the fence, its nose raised and whiskers twitching, sizing me up and I bolt the door to the hen house. Its boldness is somehow shocking. It makes no attempt to hide. It seems like a calculated risk on the rat’s part, its curiosity outweighing its fear. I momentarily wonder if this is the same animal I took pity on and saved a few years ago when it was trapped in chicken wire. Its eyes shine white in the light of my headtorch, like two bright LEDs in the dark.
20/5
A warm bright day. The grass in Earlham Park is beginning to yellow from lack of rain. In the afternoon I attend the signing of a memorandum of understanding between UEA and Norfolk Wildlife Trust. It is good to catch up with various co-conspirators on the side of nature both from UEA and from the Trust. One of the Trust’s employees tells me of how the rainfall gauge at one of their reserves hadn’t registered any rain during April. I tell her about the dryness of the leaf litter in the wood and of how early the bluebells flowered this year.
Later, I water the fruit trees in our garden, noting the number of baby quinces, apples, and pears. Even the younger trees—including the dessert apple tree we have almost given up on—seem to have a good weight of swelling fruit.
21/5
The grass in the verges is long and going to seed. It sways with the red campion and the cow parsley in the wind that’s been blowing from the north. The long fresh stems in the hedgerows sigh. The sun is strong between the clouds but the wind is cool. A dappled light falls on the tarmac through the oaks.
In the hollow by the track up to the ‘the top’ the elder trees are starting to flower. The hollow is marked as a field pond on OS maps, but most of the time it seems dry, with perhaps some boggy ground right at the bottom. Elder, hawthorn, and young oaks press all around its edges. Its banks are thick with nettles and brambles. It is the perfect home for rabbits.
We see them some distance away, three youngsters on the track. The wind is in our faces, so they don’t hear or smell us until we’ve been able to have a good look at them. One by one they lollop into the nettles and out of sight. On the other side of the track is a large field of some unidentifiable crop—rye perhaps. For several metres either side of the point at which we’d seen the rabbits two rows of the crop have been chewed down to about a centimetre in height. At the closest point to their burrow, they’ve gone further, about five rows in. The plants must be rich in sugars. What a heaven for a rabbit. Free food on your doorstep and a well hidden burrow.
It is gloaming when I shut up the hens at half past nine, the sky in the west is a deep purplish grey of fading light. Fat moths flash through the beam of my headtorch.
22/5
There are rain showers in the morning, enough to dampen down the dusty earth for a day or so. In between bursts I watch the pair of great tits that are nesting in the sparrow hotel nest-box on our gable end as they to-and-fro with caterpillars writhing in their tiny beaks.
23/5
The morning is cool and breezy. Cumulous builds steadily and the sunlight fades and grows, wavering with each passing cloud, the colours of the trees around the garden losing and regaining their intensity. It’s as if someone were playing with a dimmer switch. In the vegetable beds the potato plants are finally gathering some growing pace. Some of the larger first earlies are beginning to flower, which means that they will be ready to dig soon. The second earlies are monstrous by comparison, but probably won’t flower for another two or three weeks. Once we have taken up some of the potato plants, the courgette plants we have growing the greenhouse will take their place. The strawberries are disappointing. I think that the soil is exhausted and that we need to find an away of rejuvenating it for next year without destroying the plants. The runner beans are beginning to show signs that they might climb.
By the afternoon it is warmer outside. I transplant sweetcorn from the greenhouse in the furthest bed, positioning them between the runner beans, adopting the ‘three sisters’ planting method described by Robin Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass—or almost, since the third sister, squashes, is potatoes in my version, a line of them running down the middle of the bed beneath the bean canes.
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On ‘This Party’s Over’ I publish my creative non-fiction, personal essays, place writing, and a country diary. My ‘Another Country Diary’ pieces are my most regular posts (about three a month).
The country diary can express a sort of local distinctiveness, explore a personal set of interactions with a landscape, and in doing so, almost accidentally, tease out the way the natural world is entwined with culture and politics. It can be a quietly radical and uncanny form, or sometimes just plain parochial, oddball in its specificity.
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Another Country Diary #26
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Interesting point about red kites not taking carrion from roads - I've never seen that either, now I think about it, unlike crows - or once, a polecat, which so surprised us we turned the car around and went back for a second look.