Where in the World was Lucky?

A couple of weeks ago, the accountant in our household announced that we had a spare credit card with a little bit of credit on it, and having seen advertised on sale a chicken house with run attached, suggested we might buy it, bearing in mind we have been at Fossils Retreat almost two years now and we still haven’t had the time or resources to build a chook house.


Looks great in the advertising material, doesn't it?



And so we entered into the world of poultry keeping in two dimensions - disregarding the fact that we are now officially into autumn, and most laying hens are entering the annual moult about now and over winter. We did think the purchased house and run was pretty flimsy when we were unpacking it (looks solid as a rock in the photographs, of course), but we ended up being so thrilled that the instructions were actually very easy to follow and plenty of spare screws were supplied, and the whole thing looked so cute! with its little ramp up from the ground to the house, that we decided to go ahead and look for some tenants anyway, but resolving to go to town in the weekend and get some tent pegs to secure the base of it to the ground. We purchased a couple of young Rhode Island Red pullets from the Masterton A&P Show Poultry section, and established them in their new home. They took a few days to settle in, needing patient educating on how to eat chook feed pellets from a dish, how to slide down the ramp from their upstairs sleeping quarters (with a bit of help via a firm shove out of the nesting boxes where they weren’t laying) and they were just coming right after six days, with a couple of eggs to show, when we had a doozey of a southerly, with a burst of gale force winds and horizontal rain.

After one particular gust when we thought perhaps the house roof may be coming off, we ran to the laundry window and saw the new hen house bowled right over upside down, with the living quarters and roof smashed and broken. It was nearly dark with no chickens to be seen, but we struggled against the wind and carried the run and remains of the house into the shelter of the implement shed. The weather really was so atrocious it was pointless stumbling around, so we retired until the morning, hoping the weather would have settled down next morning.

Saturday dawned with much depleted winds and flooding visible in several paddocks along with a couple of willow branches down along our shelter belt. No hens to be seen after an hour or so fruitless searching. Some time later in the day, we were alerted by Tansy to something really interesting in the paddock next to where the hen house had been standing, which turned out to be one very sodden and very dead chicken – we figure the poor thing had probably died of fright and drowned in a deep puddle of water. Many searches in grass clumps, on hay bales, wherever a frightened (to death obviously) over the next couple of days were in vain with not a sign of the remaining hen.

Then, one sunny morning, exactly twelve days later than the storm, as we were over in the hay barn, came this loud jubilant ‘dook dook dook dook dook dook’ (which translates into ‘Egg laid! Egg laid! Egg laid!’) and here, large as life, strutting up and down on the hay bales, was one of the chickens! Now, where on earth she had been holed up for twelve days is a total mystery. She is very much a presence in the vicinity of the implement shed/hay barn, waiting for breakfast and dinner every day, and sleeping in the shattered remains of the hen house (still awaiting repair and reassembly).

Esme, now called LUCKY (for obvious reasons) perching nightly in the shattered remains of the hen house