and bring Tim back into the large plastic crate in the house we had used when the quail were chicks.
This was far from ideal as he would kick over his food and then spill his water and then his droppings would become mixed in the soggy mess and the whole thing would quickly start to smell. I learnt afterwards from those up in Feng Sui that I had placed this malodorous box in the wealth corner of my house. Possibly why wealth has been fleeing from me recently.
Once the chicks were hatched, I started moving them during the day into a special enclosure I had put together on the lawn, from chicken wire and a beach shelter, which meant Tim could go out into their hutch during the day making it easier to keep the crate clean. Solving the problem entirely, I bought a large rabbit hutch on ebay for a tenner, the type with living quarters upstairs and a hole in the floor leading to a downstairs run. I totally failed to appreciate however, that the hutch which was 4 ft high by 4 ft long would not go in my car. Now my car, is a 7 seater people carrier, and with the seats down will easily take the 6 ft tables I use for the shows, so I never expected trouble with a rabbit hutch, but I think the maximum height and width of the car was 110 cm and we needed 120. The seller offered to cut it in half and remove most of the base. I agreed thinking it wouldn't take long with a jigsaw and then watched in embarrassment as he laboured with a handsaw for forty minutes on one of the hottest days of the year. After 25 minutes it occurred to me that I could arrange to come back another day and bring my own jigsaw, but I didn't feel I could mention that after he had struggled so long. Eventually, thank god, he succeeded and we hefted it into the car. The following day all I had to do was cut a piece of wood to size (using a jigsaw) to fill in the hole in the floor and Tim was in a home of his own. He still needs company, and more females are also needed in the hutch across the way, where Una has suffered from being the sole recipient of Goldie's lust ( the back of her neck is beginning to look quite bald). But she is laying.
Here is a picture of one of her eggs compared to one of Mary's.
And this is what poached quail eggs on toast look like. They cook in about a minute, incredibly quickly, I think I will need a bit of practice before I can make the perfect poached quail's egg.
As I said before, the chicks hatched during the Great Yorkshire Show. I had ordered 6 mixed breed eggs from ebay and they sent me 3 Orpingtons and 3 Brahmas and one of each hatched. I will probably get a better hatch rate next year, as I have learnt several things about the brooding business. One is to get the hen settled on the nest before introducing the eggs. Amelia had gone broody and was sitting tight on the nest box but when the eggs arrived I moved her and them into a broody coop, so then when I encouraged her off the eggs every morning for her to eat , drink and exercise she would forget and return to the nest box instead of the broody coop, making me worry about the eggs getting chilled. But it was lovely to hear cheeping from inside an egg a couple of days before the due date and even lovelier to see the little hatchling and then a pleasant surprise to see another, the day after. I had wanted Orpingtons, because my friend has one, and it is a lovely plump cuddly hen who finds flying difficult. Brahmas are also large fat placid hens but when I had looked in my chicken breed book I had been put off by them having feathered legs which I thought would get dirty easily.
The Brahma chick however emerged with the cutest fluffy trousers
Both chicks are excessively cute and Amelia is a very good mother looking after them like well a mother hen,
She clucks constantly near them and they cheep back so that they always know where each other is. They are approaching 4 weeks now and are a little taller and have developed real feathers on their wings and can even fly short distances but are still very much in need of Amelia's protection. Chickens normally start laying when they are about 5 months old, sometimes later in pure breeds and as they don't lay much in winter I am not expecting the chicks to lay until next spring (assuming they are female of course).
Amelia has not laid since she went broody and I don't expect her to whilst she is looking after the chicks, which left me with the prospect of just one laying chicken for months ahead. I needed more. Mary was in any case lonely, she didn't like the hen house by herself and had started hanging out with next door's chickens and putting herself to bed with them. I investigated the website of The British Hen Welfare Trust and discovered that they were taking a delivery of ex battery hens that would otherwise be slaughtered in a weeks time so I put my name down for three. These deliveries are to a volunteer co-ordinators farm and as she has her own life to live all the chickens must go the same day they arrive. This takes some organisation and we were all given time slots to turn up in. I arrived with two sturdy cardboard boxes, paid a £10 donation and was given three bedraggled hens to take home.
When bored hens will peck at each other's feathers as a result all three are very scarce on wing feathers, two have bare bottoms making them look distressingly like oven ready chickens in a supermarket and one poor chicken is in addition lacking a tail.
I was warned that sometimes the shock of the change can be too much for them and they can die unexpectedly within a short time I will just see how things go. I did have a scare during the week when I thought I might have broken Briony's leg. Being as bold as a lion she was reluctant to go to bed one night. Now it was 9.30 and getting dark and raining and I wasn't at all reluctant to turn in but Briony was resisting all persuasion and so I ended up chasing her round and round the house 3 or 4 times (she is surprisingly nippy for a supposed convalescent) until I had her pinned against the wire netting which enabled me to grab her firmly and shove her into the house. The next morning as she came out, I saw her leg give way under her, and realised that she could put no weight on it. Guiltily, I rushed inside, and read on the internet about making splints from lolly sticks and keeping the bird isolated, (didn't want this I'd only just got the quail out of the house) but when I went to inspect her she was feeding and managing to get herself around and by teatime she was using the leg although limping so I was much relieved to downgrade the injury to a sprain.
The ex batts have been here a week now, and every day I scrutinise them for signs of improvement. I have read that new feathers take a couple of months so we will have to live with there awful appearance for a while yet. Their eyes are looking brighter though and I think their combs are redder. Unbelievably they are still laying, at least 1 or 2 a day between them. They don't understand what nest boxes are for so I am keeping a sharp eye out in the run. One of the first eggs was very thin skinned with a network of very fine cracks at one end but they seem to be normal now. We also noticed that despite being freshly laid they didn't poach as well as our own eggs, the white didn't hold together as well. I have no idea why this might be.
There you are then, fully updated on all the poultry happenings here. The next things will be finding more female quails, watching the ex batts recover and finding out what sex the chicks are but I will try to keep you informed.
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