Something foul going on in the fowlyard

Press, 25 June 1983, Page 17

Something foul going on in the fowlyard

Country Diary

Derrick Rooney

Eggs have been scarce in our household recently — for the first time, several weeks have passed without an egg being laid by any of our flock. Unusually frosty nights unusually early in the winter must be one of the reasons for this — the cold has retarded this year’s pullets and induced in the older hens an early and prolonged moult. But we were encouraged by the agility and vigour with which our new Light Sussex rooster was doing his thing during the- mild nor-west spell before last week’s snowfall, and hope that something is getting ready to lay again. Meantime, the old girls are a sorry J sight. Nothing can look quite so bedraggled and miserable as a moulting hen on a cold, damp morning. It seems an extraordinary evolutionary anomaly that at a time of year when other ■Rmals are additional protective covering against cold,

domestic poultry go busily about the job of shedding theirs. Scientists will tell you that the whole business of moulting is a complex cycle in which stresses, nutrient levels in the body, and the temporary cessation of egg-laying are interconnected; I prefer to consider it another example of the stupidity of the domestic fowl. Their skins do thicken at this time of the year, as anyone who has compared an autumn-killed bird with a summer-killed one will know, but a thick hide is surely no match for layers of fleecy, insulating feathers. Pullets have the right idea — they go in to their first winter fully feathered, and usually laying, too, if their breeder had his timing right. This year, though, the pullets have been very slow to develop. Friends have had the same problem, so it must be seasonal and not related to our management One thing you can’t afford to do with poultry is skimp. They need plenty of good food — grain, mash, greens, and edible household scraps — water, free range of a nettingenclosed run during the day, and dry quarters at night As long as they have a dry, sheltered place to retreat to, they don’t need any coddling against rain or snow. I. built our henhouse facing north-west, uncter high-pruned deciduous trees, soThat it is sunny and warm in winter, and shaded in

summer. In warm weather the door remains open all night, so that hens can sleep outside in their cherry-plum tree if they want to. Some degree of confinement is important, and while different people have different ideas on what constitutes good poultry management, there is general agreement that the least efficient system is the completely free-range farmyard method. Even when freerunning hens are laying well; you can’t find the eggs half the time, because they look for secret places to nest. Many farmyard flocks are genetically dubious, too — overcrossed, backcrossed, inbred, and often poor producers of eggs. Odd, that some farmers continue to feed such unproductive curiosities. They wouldn’t tolerate similar mismanagement of any other kind of livestock. We were skirting dangerously close to such a situation in our own flock last summer, which leads to another reason for our present problems with the egg supply. We were duped — not intentionally, but the result is the same as if it had been intentional. With our flock poised on the brink of inbreeding, we decided to introduce fresh blood, and bought a few Light Sussex for future crossing with our remaining pure-bred black Minorcas. Minorcas are tractive, nonaggressive birds, but the breed is a

light Mediterranean one and the inland winter is not to their liking. They go off the lay for extended periods, whereas the crossbreds moult for five or six weeks, then start laying again. The Light Sussex — the name refers to the colour, not the size — is a big, heavy bird, not in the same class as the Minorca as an egg producer, but much hardier. Handsome, too, with the black head, hackles and tail, and snowwhite body. Like most large animal breeds the Sussex is gentle and quiet, whereas the Minorcas, unless carefully handled, can be flighty, in fact, we have three which fly over the fence every day, have a scratch in the garden, then wait at the henrun gate for someone to happen along, and put them away. I suppose any breed of fowl could be made as malleable as our Minorcas, and Sussex — whose cockerels are enormous, placid creatures that can be picked up and petted; I don’t know what they weigh when mature, but at 20 weeks they were bigger than the fully grown Minorca rooster. You hear terrifying tales of aggressive roosters (a friend had a Barred Rock that specialised in leaping on the back of the neck, and digging in) but with the exception of a Rhode Island RedAWhich had to be shown who was bos''with the aid of a stick, we have never

found our roosters to be anything but the most gentle and friendly of birds. Big Red eventually developed a game leg, and had to be put down; it was pathetic to see him hopping and flopping about, like Long John Silver without a crutch, trying to defend his harem. His son, which we gave to friends, was so gentlenatured that he had to be picked up and carried whenever a bantam rooster was in the offing, which was often. His successors, the Minorcas, are so tame they will even sit on the spade while soil is being turned in their run to let them scratch for worms and grubs. It makes digging difficult. The trouble is that those big Light Sussex weren’t supposed to be what they are. We should have had three pullets and one cockerel; what we got were three cockerels and one pullet. Unfortunately, this didn’t become clear until we had been feeding them for some time. Eventually we found homes for the two spares, but for a while it meant that, with our old-timer and the cockerels we had raised for the pot, we had seven or eight roosters running about with our hens. That was all very well in summer, but in autumn it led to ructions as each one of them tried to sort out a harem. One of the, bantams was so upset by it all that she spent a month up a tree,

coming down only for a feed at dusk. So we had a massive cull of surplus poultry, and for a few weeks the freezer was crammed with carcases. The cull used to be a distasteful, disagreeable, and prolonged chore, accompanied by much foul language and clouds of feathers which flew about on every breeze. Plucking a chook, be it fresh-killed or hung overnight, was so laborious a task that the cull tended to be postponed annually, with the result that we were at risk of ending up with a flock of geriatrics. Then a friend put us on the path to happiness. “Dip the carcase in boiling water,” she said. “The feathers will practically fall out.” I tried it; it works. I knew about dipping ducks in boiling water and rinso, but it had never occurred to me to do the same with poultry. Thirty seconds or so in scalding water is all the time required; it doesn’t matter if you leave the bird a bit longer. Lift out the carcase, allow the water to drain away, and if it’s a young bird a couple of swipes with the hand will remove most of the body feathers. Another tip: do your plucking on a big sheet of plastic. This makes cleaning up afterwards a lot easier — you can just shake the feathers

into the compost heap (they are too rich in nitrogen to throw away), and hose down the plastic. When I get to the mucky part I the guts out on to sheets of newspaper, so that they can be

bundled up and disposed of with a minimum of mess. Of course, if you live in town you can hire the services of a firm which does 4 all for jwj at a modest fee, bumthat seems like cheating, somehow.