Wonderful story!Cheepy.
Cheepy was the last chick to be hatched in an incubator at Can P.
Until I introduced natural hatching at Can P, Chris had picked eggs at random and they went into a three egg incubator.. Once the chicks hatched they were transferred into a small wire cage which was kept in the large walk in larder. An infra red lamp was placed over the cage to provide warmth, water and baby chicken food were provided, and at some unspecified time, the chicks were bundled into the garden shed during the night, the home of Tribe 1, and left to fend for themselves.
Chris didn’t know which hen had laid the eggs, which male had fertilized the eggs, or if the eggs were fertile.
It was Cheepy who finally made me determined to put a stop to incubator hatching at Can P.
Cheepy was the only egg to hatch out of 3. There was no mother to teach her how to be a chicken. No tribe to which she could belong, nobody to teach her the skills she needed to survive and no brothers or sisters to keep her company. I would sit with her when I could and talk to her, but for most of her miserable life in that wire cage, nobody answered her distress calls which lasted hour after hour.
Cheepy was an incubator orphan
Cheepy was tiny and when Chris put her in with the Marans in the garden shed I can only imagine she was terrified. It seems likely given Cheepy’s size and plumage, both her mother and father were Bantams and life might have been less solitary if there had been better understanding of the tribal nature of chickens and an available Bantam tribe to which she could have been moved in with.
Somehow Cheepy survived. She grew, but remained the smallest of all the hens here. Her feathers were mainly grey and off white. She had a mop for head feathers which tended to restrict her vision and when wet looked like a gelled punk hair cut.
The much larger Maran hens in Tribe 1 were surprisingly tolerant of Cheepy. Cheepy was allowed her place on the highest perch. I didn’t see any of the much larger Maran hens bully Cheepy and while Cheepy didn’t move around during the day with Tribe 1, mainly out of choice, she didn’t show any obvious signs of being unhappy living with the Marans.
Cheepy spent the first few months of her life trying to discover what she was. For a while Cheepy seemed to think that I was the nearest creature here to a sibling, or parent, I assume because of the hours I spent talking to her when she lived in the wire cage. She never showed any sign of being afraid of me and if I sat down, or crouched she would run up my back and stand on my shoulder, or head. Despite this she was very hard to catch. As far as Cheepy was concerned it was fine if she wanted to sit on your lap but move both hands towards her and she would be gone.
It would be easy to believe Cheepy was mad but in fact Cheepy was a very clever hen. She was extraordinarily inquisitive, very fast and very secretive. For the next six months Cheepy went everywhere and almost always on her own. She spent a few weeks with the sheep, then with the donkeys and finally decided that she probably was a chicken and when she wanted company, or protection, Major was her best bet.
Cheepy had hiding places everywhere. Between 10am and 11am during the summer months all the chickens take shelter from the sun. There are a number of preferred shelter spots used by all the chickens but Cheepy had her own private spots and mid morning Cheepy would just disappear. Fortunately Cheepy didn’t take to the trees; she seemed to prefer the ground.
Cheepy was largely self sufficient. She rarely eat the chicken food provided and lived mainly off what she foraged from the compost heap and around the donkey stable.
Surprisingly, nobody bothered Cheepy. Harold, the senior cock of Tribe 2 who would drive away the other members of Tribe 1 except for Major who was just too big would let Cheepy sit with his tribe under their favorite bush and I’ve seen Harold defend Cheepy from some of the other hens. Despite this Cheepy was a solitary hen and I believe, lonely for most of her life.
Cheepy did make one unusual friend, the only dog here at Can P, Balckie (there were three bitches as well). Blackie spent his waking hours outside and was the law and brains of Can P. Blackie was very tolerant of all the other animals but Cheepy was the only chicken that I’ve seen standing between Blackie’s outstretched front legs as he lay in one of his favorite spots on the edge of the bamboo clump at the beginning of the driveway.
I would look for Cheepy on some days, partly out of curiosity and partly to make finding her if she didn’t turn up at dusk easier. Cheepy liked open spaces; she liked to be able to see around her. Long grass was always worth investigating, particularly if it caught the breeze that blows up the valley most of the year. I used to think some of the places she chose to rest in were suicidal but as I came to understand more about the behavior of both chickens and predators I realized that as long as Cheepy stayed perfectly still she might not be noticed, maybe mistaken for a rock, or some strange shrub. I have almost trodden on her a number of times when searching for her.
Cheepy started laying eggs at around seven months old. I don’t think Cheepy laid a single egg in a coop, instead all those secret places Cheepy had found in the preceding months became Cheepy’s egg hoarding places. Cheepy taught me, eventually (my own stupidity still surprises me) that a couple of days before hens actually sit on the eggs they’ve accumulated, when approached by another chicken, they hold their wings away from their bodies and make them selves look as big and fearsome as possible and make a regular clucking sound much the same as mothers do when protecting their chicks.
Cheepy always gave lots of warning. She would walk around puffed out clucking madly telling the other hens she had an enormous pile of eggs and she was going to sit on them. Cheepy was going to be an important hen. Cheepy was going to have chicks, lots of chicks. Cheepy was going to be a mother. Two to three days later Cheepy would vanish.
Conventional wisdom has it that hens choose dark secluded spots to lay there eggs; not Cheepy. In the next couple of months Cheepy stockpiled eggs in a number of her various hiding places, I spent hours searching for her and usually found her on a bank only partially concealed by a clump of long grass or wedged under a bush proudly sitting on a large pile of eggs. Sometimes it took a couple of days to find her and this was only possible because Cheepy would leave her pile of eggs for food, water and a dust bath at some point every day and I would wait for her to appear and follow her when she returned to her eggs. Once Cheepy’s hiding place had been discovered she was returned to Tribe 1’s home minus her eggs once it had got dark.
I hadn’t seen Cheepy mate with any of the cocks except Major who she would crouch for if he just looked at her, so it was unlikely that many of her eggs were fertile. This all changed one day when a procession of large black Marans with Oswald bringing up the rear marched down the track from the sheep field led by Cheepy! Cheepy had found a man! It seems to me that the next couple of months were the happiest days of Cheepy’s life. I watched Cheepy spending her days with Oswald and the Maran hens with some misgivings. Cheepy could often be seen leading a procession of Marans from one of her special places to another, half running to keep ahead of the others who took much longer strides. Cheepy would crouch for Oswald, Oswald would oblige and much to my surprise none of the Maran hens pecked at Cheepy which is normal when a junior hen tries to mate with the Tribe’s male. I just wanted to pick Cheepy up and say to her “Cheepy, Oswald won’t look after you when the chicks arrive, you’re not a Maran, you’re not one of his tribe and you’re a very junior hen.” I don’t think Cheepy cared, she seemed determined to hatch chicks.
Eventually Cheepy decided she had enough eggs and vanished. I looked in the places that I knew she favored but couldn’t find her. I spotted her briefly the next day and tried to follow but she disappeared into the thick brush and brambles on the track bank and I lost her. Chris happened to notice her as he was driving down the track one evening. Cheepy was surveying the world from a position half way up the bank that runs parallel to the track that leads to Can P. She had made a nest in some long grass where she could view the track and field below, and if she craned her neck, along the bank in both directions. She was sitting on top of a pyramid of eggs. How she survived the two nights and days it took to find her is incredible. To a hawk sitting in the woods in the bank that rises from the far side of the field she would have been in plain sight, let alone any that flew down the valley.
When we recovered Cheepy that night she had twenty two eggs!
I decided to let Cheepy sit and put her in the hospital/maternity unit with twelve of her eggs.
From watching Cheepy trying to organize her eggs on the hard floor of the maternity unit it became apparent that she was having great difficulty maneuvering the eggs into positions where she could maintain the correct temperature. She would get two or three under her and then some others would roll away. Even for a large hen keeping twelve eggs in the optimal position on a flat hard floor would be difficult, for Cheepy it was impossible and she would be constantly scratching at the floor trying to make a hollow to contain the eggs. I took the hard floor out and within a couple of hours Cheepy had dug the right sized hollow and had all the eggs gathered together held in the hollow firmly enough to allow her to turn them without any rolling away. Cheepy didn’t need any encouragement to get off the eggs to eat, drink and dust bath and the twenty one days passed without any of her eggs getting broken.
I first heard Cheepy talking to her eggs on day nineteen. On day twenty one sitting next to the maternity unit I could hear eggs cracking as Cheepy quietly clucked away as the chicks emerged. It went on all day. Every now and then a chicks head would peer out from under Cheepy’s wing or from behind her tail feathers and I noticed with some alarm that each head looked different. Cheepy was hatching an army. By the next morning Cheepy had hatched ten chicks, five males and five females, and was, as time would tell, going to be a very important hen
Cheepy had problems looking after ten chicks from the outset. It really didn’t matter how hard she worked looking for food, there was never enough and at the end of a day scratching for food Cheepy was exhausted and hungry. Then there was the problem of how to get ten chicks under her wings at night. For the first week when I looked in at night there would be a wiggling, cheeping, squabbling pile of chicks with Cheepy almost perched on top.
By the end of week two Cheepy had started to peck the chicks in frustration. I put in a perch hoping that might ease the problem. Cheepy sat on the perch but wouldn’t let any of the chicks sit alongside.
At the end of week three, Cheepy abandoned her chicks. One problem I had not foreseen was the chicks, having Oswald (Maran who never showed any interest in Cheepy or his children from the day Cheepy sat) as their father, were growing fast and were going to be larger than Cheepy within a couple more weeks. One chick (Dink) got pecked so badly on her neck that she bears the scar today.
I built an extension to the maternity unit but in the evenings when I went to shut the chickens in for the night, Cheepy would drive the chicks out and within a couple of days trying to get into the maternity unit at night became so difficult that the chicks started to perch up the trees. Collecting ten chicks out of trees and bushes at night isn’t an easy task.
During the day Cheepy screamed and pecked any of the chicks that came near her and went off on her own, usually to the donkey stable where she would hide until the chicks gave up trying to follow her.
Cheepy’s army of chicks ran wild. They went everywhere as a gang and grew to be larger than the Bantams whose territory they were hatched in and larger than Cheepy. The males would try to ambush any Bantam female and rape her if Harold, or I, didn’t get there in time. For a while it was total pandemonium.
Eventually a predator took one chick and then another, I re-homed two pairs and we eat two of the males leaving two females, Dink and Fan after three and a half months.
If Cheepy had been housed with her own kind at the outset she might have been able at some point taken the chicks back to the tribe home and the senior cock and hen would have ‘disciplined’ the chicks if Cheepy couldn’t. Cheepy couldn’t return to Tribe 1’s home, she wasn’t a tribe member even though she lived with them, nor could she turn to Tribe 2 for support because although Harold had been tolerant of Cheepy, they weren’t his children and Cheepy had never lived with Tribe 2.
Cheepy returned to her mainly solitary lifestyle. She would still scream at her remaining two daughters if they approached and in general avoided Oswald and the Maran hens. She spent a large part of her day in the Bantams territory foraging for food in the compost heap, sheltering from the sun behind the donkey stable and in the rockery in front of the main house. There are some steps leading from the terrace in front of the main house to the vegetable garden and a small wall at the top of the steps under a fig tree. This was Major’s favorite daytime place. He would spend a large part of the day here watching the various comings and goings of humans and other animals alike and on the rare occasions that Cheepy got harassed by the other chickens she would go and stand by Major for protection. I’ve never really understood the relation ship between Major and Cheepy but he never drove her away and would occasionally drop food for her. I would often sit on the steps near Major and Cheepy would appear like a ghost from nowhere beside me sometimes climbing on my shoulder where she would fidget and groom, but mostly hoping for some walnut, or other treat I usually have in my pocket.
The extension to the maternity unit had been moved and altered to house Dink, Fan and Gedit and at dusk Cheepy would return to the maternity unit to sleep alone. Cheepy would be the last to perch for the night. She would watch the rest of the chickens go into their house from a clump of small bushes and when it was quiet Cheepy would do her inspection tour. She would walk around the maternity unit, first in one direction and then the other. Next she would hop onto the roof and peer into the closed section. Then she would hover at the door of the closed in run and eventually jump onto the perch. Sometimes this sequence would be repeated and I would be standing there tapping my foot telling her to get on with it and if I went to close the run door before she had fully settled on the perch she would fly out of the door and we would go through the whole performance again.
To the best of my knowledge Cheepy never laid another egg.
I had to take a trip to England later that summer and returned to find Cheepy with an eye infection and Dandy, another hen, paralyzed. It seems nobody else had noticed Cheepy’s eye infection and when I insisted she should see a vet there was some obvious resistance to the idea that any chicken was worth a vet bill.
Cheepy got to see the vet and the vet prescribed some eye drops and I bathed the surrounding area with thyme water. The infection subsided for a week or two and returned, got treated again, subsided only to return again
It was during the period of Cheepy’s eye infection and Dandy’s paralyses that it fully dawned on me that persuading Chris and Jordan to take proper care of all the creatures they tended to acquire here at Can P was going to be an uphill struggle and was likely to cause considerable friction between me and the rest of the household.
A notable example of this is when Cheepy’s eye infection was particularly bad Cheepy showed marked reluctance to leave the safety of an outside corner of the donkey shed which was shaded by a fig tree and further protection given by a steep bank behind and a stock net fence in front. I would often find her here at dusk and would have to either escort her, or catch and carry her, up to the maternity unit at dusk..
My concern for the chickens in particular became a constant point of irritation to my sister Jordan was more often than not I would be outside making sure the chickens and Muscovey ducks got safely home and shut in for the night when supper would be on the table. Farmers are used to this and meal times are adjusted to suit the requirements of the particular animals kept. Of course, on farms and many small holdings the animals provide income and therefor have value, here at Can P ‘other things’ have always taken priority over animal care and the ‘family supper’ which can last for a couple of hours particularly when there are guests is one of those ‘other things’.
On this particular night I had coaxed the recalcitrant chickens out of the Magnolia tree and into their respective houses but Cheepy had not appeared at her usual spot in the bushes. There were guests for dinner and as I was about to go and look for Cheepy, when Jordan came out of the double doors at the front of the house looking irritated and informed me that dinner was ready and everyone else was sat at the table. I explained that I hadn’t got Cheepy yet and would join them once I had finished getting the chickens shut in for the night. Jordan looked at me decidedly annoyed and spat out ‘for gods sake it’s just a chicken’ and stomped off back into the house in a bit of a strop.
It was almost dark when I collected Cheepy from her usual spot by the donkey stable. Her eye was partially closed and looked swollen again. When I picked her up I could feel her crop was empty and I carried her up the steps to the terrace chatting to her quietly as I fed her pieces of walnut and grape. As I pulled a grape from the vine that hangs over the kitchen doors I looked into the kitchen where everyone else was sat down for supper, it sounded to me like everyone was talking at once. The kitchen table was laden with food and bottles of wine and as I stood there with Cheepy cradled in one hand I couldn’t help making a comparison to a chapter in George Orwell’s book Animal Farm where Boxer and the other farm animals looked in at the pigs in the farmers kitchen sitting around the farmers table eating and drinking while they stood hungry and neglected outside. All that was missing it seemed to me was the notice by the door that said;
‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’.
Cheepy’s eye infection subsided for a while but I don’t believe she ever fully recovered.
One day later that year I found Cheepy on the old driveway close to the compost heap with her head missing, the rest of her lying in a pile of bloody feathers. From the feather trail it looks as if a Weasel or Fagina had jumped on her from a pine tree that some of the chickens perch in on the opposite side of the old driveway to the compost heap. The predator had dragged Cheepy across the drive, bitten her head off and left the rest. Cheepy’s mop of head feathers had always had the potential to restrict her vision, particularly to things above her head and maybe with the added disadvantage of limited vision in the one infected eye, Cheepy just didn’t see the threat in time.
I have lots of Cheepy memories but the following story is one of my favorites.
I was sitting on the bench outside the kitchen double doors one evening waitng for Tribe 2 to return from the foraging trip in the sheep field. Hazel, one of the house dogs now getting old and sleepy was lying outside on the patio tiles half asleep in evening sun and the cooler evening air. Cheepy emerges from one of her hiding places in the rockery below and walks around the dozing Hazel at a 30 cm distance as if inspecting a particularly obstinate rock in a dust bath. I don’t think Cheepy liked Hazel much. It seemed every time Cheepy had unearthed something interesting in the compost pile Hazel would arrive and steal it. It was always Hazel’s shit in Cheepy’s newly dug dust bath and most recently some scraps that Cheepy had her eye on thrown out from the kitchen had been eaten by Hazel who in Cheepies eyes could do with losing a few kilo’s.
Cheepy made another circuit stopping 10cm or so from Hazels nose and looked carefully at Hazels closed eyes. She then walks quickly to Hazels rear end, takes a few steps forward and sinks her beak into Hazels bum as hard as she could. Hazel wakes up with a start and spins round to confront Cheepy. Much to my amazement Cheepy just stood there as if to say ”what are you going to do about that then?” Hazel looked at Cheepy for a moment then lazily scratched her belly with a back leg and wandered off.
Cheepy did get her wish and did become a very important hen. Her daughter Dink went on to become the founder of two more tribes here at Can P and is one of the most extraordinary chickens I have known.
Points.
Chickens learn from watching their mother and their siblings and later, other tribe members. Before chicks hatch they are aware of their siblings and familiar with the sound of their mother. While chickens are born with certain abilities such as the scratching the ground for food and it seems awareness of some predators, other behavior, particularly social behavior is learnt. A chicken doesn’t know it’s a chicken unless there are other chickens to compare itself to.
While traditional style nest boxes with hard floors or mesh floors may be fine for egg laying they are less than ideal for a hen who is hatching eggs. Most hens and cocks scratch at the ground when making a nest site. This is to create a hollow in which to lay the eggs. Bare earth is better but earth with growing vegetation is better still. The cocks and hens can then make a hollow, and/or form a basket in which to lay the eggs with the added advantage that long grass/vegetation provides cover and some protection from predators.
A sitting hen turns her eggs and pushes those with a higher temperature to the outskirts of the clutch in order to keep as many eggs as possible within the required temperature range. A hollow also allows the hen to sit on top of the eggs rather than have the eggs spread around her. This is particularly important for some of the heavier breeds because it allows them to place their legs directly underneath them rather than splayed out at the sides which can cause tendon strain. It is also important during the last three days of incubation that the eggs remain orientated with the unhatched chicks head uppermost.
Not all hens prefer dark enclosed spaces to lay their eggs. What would seem most important is the hen feels the spot is secure; the level of light would seem to be less importance. (See Ruffles, Donk, Fat Bird, Mel, Fudge, Pinch)
Chickens don’t have teeth, they swallow what they eat unprocessed. The ingested food gets pushed down their throats into a storage organ called the Crop. You can feel a chickens crop if you run your hand down their neck to their breast. As the chicken eats the crop swells and a mucus that partially softens the food is released. Below the crop is another organ called the Gizzard. The Gizzard is the organ that grinds the food into a pulp that is suitable for the rest of their digestive system to process. The Gizzard is the chickens’ teeth. The Gizzard is made up of muscles that work against each other to produce a grinding effect. The Gizzard needs a certain amount of hard particles in it to rub against the harder foodstuffs such as seeds and corn in order to function properly. This is why chickens need grit in their diet. Both the crop and gizzard are constantly working unlike in some mammals where the digestive system rests, usually when sleeping. The presence of food in the crop encourages the secretion of the softening mucus. If a chicken goes to sleep with an empty crop, the gizzard stays active but grinds the grit against the membrane that covers the gizzard muscles and because mucus isn’t being secreted the gizzard and the grit become dry. This is very uncomfortable for the chicken and can damage the gizzard. A chicken with an empty crop doesn’t sleep well which also has adverse affects on their health.
When hens sit on their eggs they go into a type of trance. If you pick a hen up who had been sitting on eggs and place her on the ground she will remain in the sitting position and it takes some encouragement to get her to stand; food usually does the trick. There is some mechanism that releases the hen from the trance and unlocks her legs when she leaves the eggs to feed and bath, possibly hunger.
You can slide your hand underneath some sitting hens without getting pecked provided you keep your hand low as you approach. Raise your hand and you’ll get pecked.
Hens that lay eggs away from the chicken houses don’t generally pick a spot more than 50 metres from their usual feeding point.
Hens about to sit make fast clucking sounds and puff themselves up to look as threatening as possible when another chicken approaches.
The day before a hen sits she eats noticeably more than usual.
Chickens don’t see well in the dark and this makes it easier to handle them after dusk.
Cheepy’s attack on Hazels rear end was premeditated. This would seem to suggest that chickens have the ability to plan and carry out a course of action. (See Rosehip)
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I spend much of my free time just watching how my birds behave and interact in the world around them . Ive noticed many of the behaviors you describe in you're own chickens, in mine. I find myself in awe of them more often than not.
Your refrence to Animal Farm caught me off guard, I have read it as well as my kids. And have made similar references to the very same with my kids when they want to eat before the animals have been fed. So i understand your feeling completely as you stood watching the goinings on in the kitchen while holding Cheepy.. its a sad image in my mind.
I apologize for getting so behind here. Its been a bit crazy here at home with schedules changing and a wonderful vacation to visit our dd and her family in Florida.. and the beach as well.
I will get caught up in this thread for sure... although it may take me a bit of time.
Keep up the good work.. here on your thread and at Can P..
