Chicken Run

Oink. This is not a chicken.

The Pilsdon woodland is eerily silent. Where once there were chickens strutting about, clucking, squawking, scratching and pecking, there is now nothing but fallen leaves. Our chickens have departed, ushered into chicken heaven where no human steals their eggs. Their bodies, too old and tough to be considered for the table, have been incinerated on the “burn pile”. Their enclosure lies fallow.

The chicken coop

This is a periodic event at Pilsdon. We get our chickens in a batch of about thirty from a factory farm where they have already outlived their usefulness, and would otherwise have been killed already. Here they get an extra year or two of life, and what a life! Instead of being crammed inside a large shed as their entire existence had been to date, they find themselves in a small wood, their natural habitat, and left to roam. At night they have a big coop to roost in. They are fed twice a day. Their bedraggled scrawny bodies gradually assume a healthy gloss and they plump up. Their egg production, whilst not at peak levels, nevertheless returns a useful number for Pilsdon's kitchen.

Eventually they do get too old to lay enough eggs to warrant keeping them and at that point they are replaced with another set of lucky “rescued” birds. We are in the interim period right now and have taken the opportunity to replace the entirety of the fencing that encircles the woodland, and the internal fences that supposedly subdivided it into separate areas, although now it was all so decrepit that the chickens could get anywhere they liked.

The pigpen is at the edge of the small woodland

So this week we've been out there in the cold, snipping the fencing from posts with wire-cutters, yanking the posts out of the ground and hauling them onto the burn pile, rolling up the mangled fencing and taking it to the tip. It's been a revelation to see the woodland opened up. It's a beautiful spot, especially with the sun lighting up the young birch trees and the leaf litter beneath. For so long it's been off limits to anyone who isn't a chicken or a chicken-feeder, and now for a little while we can reclaim it as our own.

The new fence posts arrived yesterday, and soon we will begin banging them in all round the perimeter, before starting to attach fresh fencing. It's a large rectangle, my guess is about twenty metres by thirty. We'll use movable electric fences for the subdividing partitions rather than fixed ones, the idea apparently being that grass will grow in the areas where the chickens are not. (I have my doubts as to whether any grass will grow at all under these trees!) And before Christmas a new platoon of fresh-beaked hens will arrive to occupy our woodland again. Lucky critters!

New posts and fencing ready and waiting