Nobody here but us chickens

There is talk round her of "keeping chickens again". Mum and Dad used to keep chickens in the fenced off bit of the garden still called "The Chicken Run". I am told they were great to keep and used to yield a good supply of free range eggs but there were, then, 3 problems.

• Rats: - it's very difficult to completely avoid waste food because it's always tempting to put down too much and not clear it up again, and chooks are messy eaters, so spilt grain gets under the ark and in come the rats. Meggie, in fact got really good at ratting, and killed 30-40 in the time we had chickens, but realistically, she couldn't chase a rat in open pursuit, she got them when they cornered themselves in the greenhouse
• Mites and lice - once established in a wooden type ark these were a menace to control - we were sure they are there in our local wild bird population, so you could strip down the ark and coop as many times as you like - you never completely eradicated them, especially Norhthern Red Mite which are worse than fleas for making your skin crawl - they are slow moving and you only have to see one to start imagining itches all over
• Garden destruction - OK -we got, by mistake, some full sized chooks rather than bantams (more of that in a minute), but 4 of them seemed able to reduce the run to a brown, plantless waste ground, so we let them out into more and more bits of garden, till eventually they were wrecking the whole site. They could wipe out a seedling bed in seconds, seeming to clear acres with a few side swipes of their big feet during "dust-bathing" or scratching for grubs. The garden was looking like it might end up supporting only chicken-proof plants like daffs, alliums and rose of Sharon

Hmmm... the full sized chooks. Yes, "our" breeder was a bit vague re what made a bantam and what wasn't - and managed even to mix up some tiny chicks of bantam Rhode Island Reds with full-size Rhodies. We got one of each. We had (I'm told) a black and white Leghorn which was allegedly a bantie, but actually quite big. And we had a big ol' Marran too. Nice size eggs, but really these were full sized chooks and did full sized damage to the garden. Dad's favourite was actually a bantam - a Partridge Pekin with big feathery feet. Whenever she was thinking of going broody, she'd fly up to land on Dad's arm, like a falconry bird, and he could walk around with her. She was named "Madame Poule" as she was always busy - named after a waitress in a restaurant near the "Les Puces" flea market in Paris

Soooo... the talk of chooks centres around DEFINITELY having only bantams sized ones and confining them to the chicken run. Plus (we think) getting one of those new "Eggloo" plastic houses which might be a lot easier to keeop clean of mites and parasites.

Westies, Meg and the H tell me, are able to live perfectly happily alongside chooks, once the dogs are used to the birds and vice versa, and the humans have plenty of photo's of M+H mingling happily in the garden with the chooks, each wandering happily in and out of each others' territory. Haggis tells me he was once pecked summarily on the nose by the bantam Rhodie and it quite put him off chasing them. Just in case we got oo attached, Mum had them all named as chook recipes - "Maryland", "Korma", "Tikka Massala" etc

We'll see

Deefer