A few weeks ago, one of our two queenies decided to sit on her wooden egg. ( Lovely it was, very realistic, bought in a car boot sale in a bag of 10, that I believe was meant to be used for dawning socks)

 I thought she was going to sit on it until she got fed up. Surely when she realizes there is no life in that egg she will come out and get on with hers. I read what people do when this happens in their coop and I don’t like it a bit. Lena put the hen’s arse in cold water to shake her out of that broody state.  Quite barbaric. I can’t remember what our mum used to do on our farm…

When this happened to Dom, she bought a few fertilised eggs but her broody girl only sat on them for a few days before abandoning them, to her granddaughter’s great disappointment.

 I had not expected for our second Queenie to do just the same one week later…with both egg boxes now being used, I made another egg box there for Brownie and Cinders in the hope they get the message.

Strangely enough the new egg box is still vacant and I cannot understand how Cinders who can be heard loud and clear calling regularly as if she had made an egg, but when I check, there is no egg anywhere. I go around the yard thinking maybe she had made a nest outside somewhere in the long grass…but nothing.

I am intrigued and investigate further. I find Cinders squeezed in the egg box with one Queenie and pondered what she is doing there. I put on some gloves as I do not want to be pecked at and slide my hand under the girls. Oh my! I find a dozen eggs, all the same exact colour and size. Same under the other Queenie in the egg box below.

Cinders has been giving the girls her eggs to take care of. And now those three girls are making noises as if they have a flock of chicks… Like us, they must be affected by the state of the world because they are totally bonkers.

Another example of the bonkers world we live in: My cousin’s baby girl had convulsions every time she had a fever. And because she was teething the poor thing had often a fever. She was taken to the hospital an hour away every time she was convulsing as the parents were desperate to save their child. The baby girl was given tests but because nothing unusual was found she was given some anti-convulsion pills and sent home.

Doctor Pierre who we saw yesterday related the conversation to us:

– Bring your baby to me here and I’ll do some checks.

After checking the baby…

-Your baby has worms.

A course of homeopathy and the baby’s convulsions are something of the past.

The body needs to be dealt with as a whole, he confided to us. There is no mystery. Pierre works with homeopathy and acupuncture and has remarkable results.

I need to get on with the extension of the chicken coop with the young ones moving in there as soon as possible before the end of July when the young hens will start laying. I keep saying that but with all other work the extension has been pushed to the back burner. But now time is pressing.

Because the space between the coop and the pen is so small, the walls and roof have been made under the barn and not in situ with an assembly method that has to be thought about with care. Friends have offered their help but I don’t need help. I just need my thinking cap on. It’s like solving a Chinese puzzle.

Fortunately for the girls, when the pen door opens in the morning the flock has a great field to play in. Sebastien at the lithium battery workshop has made an automatic door for his chickens saying it works really well. He suggested one of those for us but I said no, I so enjoy opening and closing the door and checking on them. Yesterday, for the first time in weeks, I saw that Queeny2 was back on the top perch as the head of the coop. Sweet Brownie walking in and out of my legs, waiting for treats, completely trusting that she would not get hurt and Cinders doing her amazing 10 metre-flight when she first comes out of the coop as she runs to see if I had dropped some compost near the entrance of their field.  All of this is priceless to me.

Martin has experienced not being his body. Nor his thoughts nor his emotions. It is so great to be reminded of that. It leaves me with a sense of wonders. Who am I?

“I am not the body, I am not the mind, I am the soul observing both” Dadi Janki

OK, now let’s jump a whole week and the extension of the coop is complete starting work as early as 6am to avoid the heat. Then one night we went to get the young ones from their perch and brought them to their new lodgings. As we were picking them up one by one to carry them, we had 2 screamers: One was the top girl, a feisty little black hen, and the second was the main cockerel, entirely white with beautiful blood red big combs.

The other chicks were quiet and lame.

Even though they were not hurt at all, the whole neighbourhood must have thought someone was being murdered!

I could not have never imagined what happened next: The whole flock ignores their coop entirely and flies onto its roof to roost every night. Is it to avoid the heat?

One of the cockerels had to be put back in the old pen on the second day: 2 cockerels for 9 girls is simply too much for the girls to bare. They were for ever looking for a place to hide from them…The coop is now very quiet and it is bliss. Or is it?

The old coop is on the other side of the house and we never used to hear them or very faintly. The new coop is on the bedroom side and our very vocal, one and only cockerel, starts to crow right on time at 5.30am!

I am re-thinking now that an automatic door for them might be a good idea after all. Natasha came around to invite us for dinner and we had to decline. Closing the troops at 21.45 is a must if we want to keep them alive….